Playing Catch-Up
by 5557
Summary: Hunk awakens out of the medical pod to find everyone else still inside, and only Lance is there to take care of them all. He's glad to be reunited with Lance, but as time goes on, Hunk realizes that things are not entirely what they seem…
1. 2:34PM 23062065

Hey there! This was my story for the Voltron Primary Big Bang project, where I partnered with several artists to illustrate the story. I don't know how works with art, so if you want to see if, you can head over to my Ao3 account under the same name, 5557. This is intended to be an archival copy of the fic in case it is lost on Ao3. The original word length was 10,000 words, but due to popualr demand, I decided to extend the story instead of leaving it at its original cliffhanger ending.

Hunk became aware of his toes first.

In the blackness of his waking, he could feel them, tingling, at the end of his body. He slowly wiggled each one, gently testing his body's capabilities before he risked opening his eyes or lifting his head. They worked, thankfully.

He noticed that his breath was shallow, and he was incredibly cold. And he was upright. No, Hunk wasn't in his bed, as he'd first imagined. He must've been in a medical pod.

As if responding to his thoughts, he heard the faint hiss of something in front of him sliding away, and felt a warm rush of air hit his face. Hunk opened his eyes. Yes, he confirmed. He was in a pod that had just released him into the medical bay of the Castle of Lions. Hunk gathered his strength and steadied his knees and took a step forward; bleary but otherwise alright.

As his eyes adjusted to the dim light of the bay, Hunk took in his surroundings. He was alone in the entire room as the quiet hum of the other pods around him stood in activation. Hunk counted the four other pods. And everyone in them.

Pidge, Allura, Coran, Keith. All of them, frozen in stasis except…

"Oh, my god! I'm so sorry, I forgot! I ran up here to meet you on time! I wrote it down, I swear!"

Lance's voice came at him in a high-strung panic as he burst through the doorway and into the bay, gasping for breath and running straight towards Hunk. Hunk couldn't get a word of his own in edgewise as Lance barrelled into him, fingers suddenly digging into his sides and Lance hugging him closer and tighter than Hunk ever thought possible.

"You're out! You're out. Oh my god, Hunk. You're here. Oh my god, my buddy. _My buddy_." Lance's words were barely distinguishable as they slurred together through his incessant rambling, and that was before Lance pressed his face down into Hunk's chest, further muffling himself. After a bit more unintelligible mumbling, Hunk swore he could pick out the words "God, it feels nice to hug you" from somewhere under his left breast.

There was a brief struggle of awkward squirming as Lance refused to let him go, but Hunk managed to loosen an arm from under Lance's death grip, pulling it out and bringing it around to pat his best friend's head, smoothing his tousled and, frankly dirty, hair aside. Lance stayed like that, mollified by the sensation until Hunk could feel Lance's growing self-consciousness pull his head away from under the weight of his touch.

"I'm sorry I didn't clean up," Lance apologized, rolling his head to the side as Hunk took in the dotted stubble of brown hairs on Lance's chin, "I just… I got really tired and I kinda forgot until it was too late."

"It's fine," Hunk replied, "All good. I'm just glad to see you awake instead of in one of those pods like everyone else."

He gave his friend a firm squeeze as Lance nodded silently in his arms.

While Lance calmed his near-hyperventilating against his chest, Hunk had a moment to really take him in. He was completely dishevelled. As well as not shaving, Lance looked like he hadn't showered or even changed his wrinkled and stained clothing in over a week. Hunk couldn't bring himself to comment on how Lance smelled.

Hunk's gaze eventually moved away from Lance and around the wider room. There was a tablet and several books on the bench near the active pods, as well as a pillow and blanket half-fallen onto the floor. There were empty bowls of food, too, he noticed. Littered here and there and in other places Hunk hadn't quite expected; over on one of the dashboards, or right next to Allura's pod. Obviously Lance had spent a good deal of time hanging around the bay, visiting with his friends in stasis while waiting for them to heal.

"But," Lance exclaimed suddenly, pulling back and away from Hunk, "That's enough of that! No need to panic," he grinned, clapping his hand together, "You're here now! We can talk and- and hang out!"

"Hang out?"

"Yeah! Oh my god, Hunk, it's gonna be so _great_ to have someone else around while the others are still in!" Lance bubbled with excitement as he started to dance around the room, waving his arms wildly over his head.

Hunk enjoyed the brief moment of giddy silliness that seemed to have overtaken Lance. He watched Lance skip and pirouette and nearly fall after tripping on one of the leftover bowls, all the while laughing at himself. Despite his dirty clothes and unwashed state, he was still Lance, and still able to make joy out of nothing.

"What's that?" Hunk inquired, pointing to what was obviously Lance's handiwork. Just behind Lance, Pidge's pod had a moustache drawn on it in what looked like black sharpie.

"Oh," Lance laughed, glancing over his shoulder, "I got bored. I think it suits her, don't you?"

"Ok, yeah," Hunk smirked, amused at the absurdity of the gesture, "But, Lance…" His voice trailed away as Hunk attempted to regain his composure, too many questions flooding his mind to ignore, "What happened? Why's everyone in the pods?"

Lance's playful exuberance melted away and he stared bluntly at Hunk.

"You don't remember the bomb?"

"...No." Hunk shook his head, trying to pull any recent memories to the forefront. He could vaguely remember heat, and a deafening crash, but nothing before or after that.

"You don't remember the sentries or wormholing?"

No. He couldn't. Everything was a blur. Hunk woke up in the pod, found Lance, and... that was it.

"I'm sorry, Lance," He shrugged apologetically, "It's all coming up blank. Can you fill me in?"

"Oh, yeah. Yeah!" Lance's face lit up at the suggestion, and then, suddenly, "But, why don't we get you something to eat, first? I bet you're hungry, big guy!"

It was certainly a tempting invitation.

"I am, I am," Hunk nodded, smiling, feeling the warmth of Lance's enthusiasm reinvigorating him from the cold slumber of the pod. And, for a brief moment, the way Lance spoke oddly reminded Hunk of that first order of fries he'd shared with his best friend when he'd dropped his own on the cafeteria floor one fateful day.

And Hunk let his thoughts drift back to several years ago, to a new school with new classmates and plenty of expectations for the chubby brown kid who skipped a grade and got in a year early. To ugly pink walls and grey cement steps and kids milling around outside in brand new jeans and brand new sneakers, cloistered in tight circles, waiting for the bell to ring.

"Uh, hey Lance? Can I get some clothes?"

Hunk folded his arms as he felt a small shiver run up his back. He was wearing only the thin, white medical bay leotard, and it was about as warm as it was modest.

"Oh! Shit. One sec, I was just gonna grab some of these," said Lance, now busily marching around the room, scooping up bowls and bits of strewn garbage.

"Shit, shit," he muttered, standing up straight and spinning himself around in circles, "I think I left your clothes in your bedroom. I can go grab them. Just a sec. Or- can you deal with the blanket for now?"

"Yeah, sure," said Hunk, grabbing the grey woolen emergency blanket off the floor and wrapping it around his shoulders. It wasn't much, but he felt a little more decent standing in a tight onesie with no shoes on.

Hunk overheard Lance breathe a little sigh of relief.

"Hey, Hunk?"

"Yeah?" Hunk shrugged the blanket up a bit higher and watched as the pile of bowls and food garbage in Lance's arms grew steadily larger.

"Remember when we first met and you bought me french fries?"

"Yeah. Weird," said Hunk, "I was literally just thinking about that..."

Lance made an indistinct noise of agreement.

"Geez, I don't remember making such a mess up here," Lance laughed, a little self-consciously, as he carefully leaned over one of the bay dashboards to pile yet another bowl onto his stack, "But, y'know buddy, I _do_ remember your stupid haircut on that first day of school."

"Oh, god, don't remind me," groaned Hunk, burying his face in his hands.

"You shaved half your head to look like what's-his-face! That rapper!"

Hunk could hear spoons clattering onto the floor from behind his fingers.

"It was a _phase!_ "

"That's not what you said in middle school!"

"Yeah, well… " Hunk shrugged, hot flush of embarrassment rising in his cheeks, "Thanks, again. For standing up to those assholes for me."

"Hey. No problem, man. They deserved it. And, y'know," Lance grinned as he placed the final bowl in his stack, "Thanks for buying me fries."

Lance haphazardly dumped the pile of empty bowls and food wrappers at his feet, scanning the room to see if he'd missed anything. Hunk's gaze kept drifting past Lance to the sleeping faces of his friends in stasis, their frozen bodies floating silently in the pods behind them.

"Hunk?" Lance began, his voice a bit more apprehensive this time.

"Yeah?" Hunk was shaken back to the present, and he watched as Lance carefully considered his words.

"...Can I hug you again?"

Lance seemed to be avoiding his gaze for some reason.

"Of course," said Hunk, surprised that his friend even needed to ask, "C'mere."

And within seconds, Lance fell into his arms once more, but this time it was much softer, gentler and slower. Hunk could feel Lance's quivering body sinking into his grip as he wrapped the grey blanket around them both and rubbed his hand reassuringly up and down his friend's back. It occurred to Hunk, as Lance leaned against him quietly in his arms, that he could clearly feel Lance's protruding spine and bony shoulder blades, even through the layers of his shirt and jacket. It unnerved him a little. Lance had always been scrawny, but this was different. Lance looked and felt like he was sick.

"Good thing we're getting food, you skinny asshole," said Hunk, smiling and patting his friend. Lance laughed into the heavy thumps on his back.

They began wandering down towards the kitchen, Lance leading Hunk with the stack of bowls under one arm and refusing to let go of Hunk with his other hand the entire time.

The hallways were strangely dark. As Hunk counted, more than half of the lights weren't working, and where there was light, there were also huge black streaks of smoke stains rising up the walls and coating large portions of the ceiling. Along with piles of mechanical rubble scattered here and there, a thick layer of dust covered the hallway floor, interrupted by many, many Lance-sized footprints.

"I cleaned up most of the bodies along the way up here, so it'd be easier to get around..."

"Bodies?" Hunk felt another shiver as he glanced down one of the side corridors they were passing by and caught a brief glimpse of what appeared to be a severed arm or leg lying in the middle of the floor. Or maybe it was just a shadow.

"Er, the sentries. Even though I know they're just scrap metal, they remind me of bodies. It started to bother me."

Hunk nodded, tempted to stop and take a few steps back for a second look down that hall. Lance kept pulling him forward.

"Jesus, this bomb, dude. You'll have to tell me all about it." Hunk let out a low whistle as he eyed a large crack running diagonally up one of the castle walls. The light above it was flickering on and off erratically.

"Yeah. The castle's been on pretty minimal power ever since the sentries went off," said Lance, following Hunk's eyes along the jagged crack, towards the flickering light where electric sparks sputtered from it, floating down towards the dusty floor. "But, eh y'know, it's more than enough for one person. But it was a helluva fight, man. And you put up a great defense! I remember your… You used your cannon really well."

"Did I now?"

"Yeah!" Lance grinned at him, and Hunk couldn't help but notice his chapped lips and the dark circles settled under Lance's eyes.

"Dude, no offense, but you look like shit."

Lance's face sank and Hunk internally kicked himself, immediately regretting his words. He was scrambling to think of something nicer to say when Lance cut him off.

"I'm sorry, man. I know. I just…" Lance paused, scratching his head, "I've been waiting for you guys out here. Heh. And when it's just me by myself, I kinda... stopped caring as much."

Hunk nodded. "How long was I out?"

The cheeky grin returned as Lance threw his head back and laughed.

"Oh... Like, a couple weeks, more or less. Anyway, I'm sorry I'm such a gross mess. It's just been me here all alone, you know. Doing the _Risky Business_ dance naked through the castle."

Hunk looked around as the lengths of various corridors off the main hall slowly disappeared into dim lighting and dusty haze.

"Lot of freedom to walk around nude, huh?"

"Yep. Lotta time to think."

Through the hallway, down towards the main stairwell they walked together, and Hunk was oddly struck by just how much dust was everywhere. The battle Lance kept mentioning must have taken place throughout the entire castle, as there was no corner where Hunk didn't see a greyish layer of finely blasted marble and powdered chemical exhaust.

As they made their way down the hallway, he noticed that Lance's footsteps barely made a sound as he walked. His own bare feet slapped heavily on the ground, stirring up puffs of dust, and making Hunk feel incredibly self-conscious. Lance seemed to float beside him, effortlessly silent, as if he had grown used to trying to make as little noise as possible.

Hunk wiped his finger along the bannister when they reached the top of the stairs, revealing the smooth, polished black surface underneath the thick layer of grey dust coating it.

"Yeah, I know," sighed Lance, "I gotta work on it. I did try to clean up some of the junk right after the battle, but, as you can see, it's everywhere... And the castle's super damaged, and I don't know how to fix half the shit that's broken so, uh, I mostly just... gave up."

"Pfft, lazy-ass," Hunk snickered.

"Heh. I know. I'm kind of a slob."

After a few more steps, Hunk noticed the words _I'm a motherfucking HERO_ written into the bannister dust in huge fingerprint letters as they descended the stairs.

"Uh, dude?" Hunk thumbed at the graffiti.

"Well, I am!" huffed Lance, "I saved all your asses! Dragged every single one of you up to the pods and got you all stuffed inside, safe and sound!"

"Even me?"

Lance shrugged, and the pile of bowls and garbage under his arm shifted slightly.

"Nah, uh, actually I think you still were able to walk. But if I recall, you were completely out of it. Your head was bleeding."

"Makes sense." Hunk brought his free hand up and ran it smoothly through his hair. He felt fine. Not a trace of any wound remaining.

"See? Told you!" said Lance, "I kept you safe and got you better! You can thank me later, pal."

Lance shot Hunk his trademark cocky smirk. It was slightly undermined by the fact that Lance was still holding his hand. It made Hunk feel that warm sense of connection again. He liked it. He liked Lance.

"So, you said there was a huge battle. Are we at least safe now?"

"I assume so, yeah," Lance replied as they continued down the stairs and into the large entrance hall, "When Allura wormholed us, it spat us out into deep, deep space. Like, it's insane, Hunk, when you pull up the celestial map. We're not near any galaxies. We're not even in the galactic cluster! We're practically off the edge of the universe! There's _nothing_ out here..."

Lance's voice got really quiet as he kicked a piece of rubble from an area in the main hall where the ceiling was crumbling overhead.

"... Not even stars."

Hunk wished he hadn't been watching Lance when he said that. He caught a glimpse of something he felt he shouldn't. Something deep and dark that Lance wasn't yet ready to reveal to him as he quickly plastered that toothy grin back on his face and squeezed Hunk's hand reassuringly.

"Oh! Yeah! I forgot!" Lance exclaimed as they rounded the corner and entered the dining hall, "You get to meet someone!"

Hunk didn't have time to process the sudden whiplash of Lance's mood. He was too busy being utterly flabbergasted by what he saw.

"Lance, why is the training room bot sitting at the table in the dining room?"

Awkwardly slumped in one of the few chairs that wasn't mysteriously missing from the room was the practice bot the Paladins used for combat training. It was wearing a makeshift bow tie around its neck and a pair of Altean slippers. The deactivated bot sat hunched over, its ovular head propped up by a metallic elbow on the table and a loose palm under its chin. Hunk imagined that if one sat down in front of it, they could pretend that the bot was listening intently to deep conversation.

"His name is Theodore Richard Archibald Ignatius Nathaniel Ivan-Evans," said Lance, proudly, momentarily breaking his hold on Hunk's hand to motion with a grandiose flourish towards the bot.

"What?"

"I call him Trainie. We're buds. And, hey! Did you know that Altean training bots have a _dance_ mode? Dude. I can lead _and_ follow now!" And Lance was now starting to launch forward in a way that told Hunk he was about to demonstrate, but Hunk gripped Lance by his skinny wrist and held him back.

"Yeah, ok. But… _why?_ "

Lance shrugged.

"I got bored."

"Apparently."

Boredom seemed to be a key theme with Lance.

Before Hunk could comment further, a deep, rumbling metallic groan echoed loudly up from the base of the castle, thundering through the very foundations of the walls until it passed upwards, rattling the pipes in the upper floors, leaving Lance still and Hunk momentarily speechless.

"Shit."

"What _was_ that?" asked Hunk, looking around to confirm that the castle walls were still intact and holding them in.

"Nothing much, really," Lance replied casually, "It happens from time to time. I haven't figured out what's causing it, but I think it has something to do with the air circulation. Let's just get our food quickly and go sit down in the common room, 'cause it's about to get _really_ cold in the castle for about an hour. "

Not entirely convinced, Hunk nodded as Lance dragged him away from the overdressed training bot and towards the kitchen.

"Ok! Lemme whip you up something _real_ good!" said Lance, rubbing his hands together after dumping the pile of bowls on the kitchen counter with a loud clang of ceramic on metal.

Hunk coughed expectantly.

"What?" Lance was now trying to inconspicuously shove his pile of wrappers into an overflowing trash can under the sink.

"Put them _in_ the dishwasher. Don't just leave them on the counter."

Lance let out a childish whine. "I'll do it after we eat."

Hunk glared at Lance.

"I promise."

"Alright."

Hunk was mostly teasing, and he was glad that Lance was mostly playing along. Some things never changed. Either way, Hunk didn't want to press the subject too hard. He couldn't stop thinking about the feel of Lance's spine and his bony wrist in his own meaty hand and the way Lance looked like he needed a few square meals.

The broken monitor near the food goo dispenser stated that it was nearly empty, but with a few precise bangs on the machine with his fist, Lance was able to produce two full bowls of green foodstuff for them on two miraculously clean bowls he'd found at the very back of the dish cabinet.

"Well, erm, actually... It's just food goo," sighed Lance, putting the dispenser back in its socket, "And I don't know how to cook it, and I'm pretty sure anything fancy has been turned off to save power. But, y'know. Food goo."

"Food goo." Hunk nodded, accepting the bowl of green slime from Lance.

"I'll do the dishes as soon as we eat, _I promise_ ," said Lance, running his spoon around the bowl and stirring the green slime within. He didn't look terribly pleased with the meal, and Hunk made a mental note to fix him something nicer later.

The common room was surprisingly clean and devoid of garbage and mechanical junk. Only that same omnipresent layer of dust permeated the room, with far fewer footsteps from Lance trailing around. Lance hadn't spent much time in here while Hunk and the others were away in the pods healing.

After shoving his bowl into Hunk's hand, Lance balled up his fists inside his jacket and started wiping furiously at the couch with his sleeves. The effort didn't really make the seats much cleaner, instead he just ended up smearing the dust around on the cushions and floor.

"Don't worry about it," said Hunk, holding the two bowls and heading to cut Lance off and sit down. Lance brushed his dirty sleeves on his dirty pants and climbed onto the couch beside him.

Lance was right. The temperature was dropping fast, and Hunk readily welcomed Lance cuddling up beside him as he wrapped the grey blanket around the both of them while Lance kicked off his sneakers and tucked up his legs. And, in those few quiet moments, where Lance was leaning against him, and the only noise was metal spoons clinking on ceramic bowls, Hunk could ignore the unsettling darkness in the hallways and the staleness of the air. He could ignore the black traces of old explosions and the random bits of robotic shrapnel scattered throughout the castle. Hunk dug into his first real meal in weeks with his best friend by his side and he could actually feel _cozy_ under the dim and flickering lights of the empty common room.

"This room seems a lot cleaner," said Hunk between bites, "Was there any fighting in here?"

"Oh, right," choked Lance, pounding his chest as he swallowed a large mouthful of food, "The battle! It was intense, man. And, uh, no. Not in here. I remember Allura and Keith kicking ass against those waves of bots, though. And- God, she was the worst to put in the pod. Did you know Allura weighs, _like, a ton?_ "

"Oh, yeah?" mumbled Hunk as he scarfed more food down.

"I had to drag her on a piece of metal to get her up to medical bay! And then," Hunk felt Lance involuntarily flinch against him, "Oh god, I remember her hair got caught on a sharp corner, and I was panicking at the time, and I _tried_ to be so careful, Hunk, but I accidentally ripped out a few- like… Like a _chunk._ I felt so bad about it for- forever, dude."

Lance was staring down at his bowl, absently stirring his food, and Hunk could see his eyes flickering; could see Lance reliving the memory.

"Lance, it'll heal up. Chances are she won't even remember it," he said softly, while giving Lance's shoulder a squeeze, "I certainly can't."

"Yeah," Lance nodded, slowly, "It just… it just really sucked putting everyone in like that. Just staring at them. At you. And waiting for you to get better. I mean, I _did_ write down your pod timer. I did. I just… I'm sorry I forgot to be there when you woke up, Hunk. I really wanted to be there. It was important to me."

Hunk heard the cracks in Lance's voice as he spoke, and he felt the weight behind Lance's words.

"Hey. It's alright, man. Don't worry about it. I mean, I was unconscious the whole time, so it's like I just fell asleep a couple minutes ago!" Hunk laughed, patting his best friend on the back.

"...yeah…" sighed Lance, eyes drifting back down to his bowl.

"How many were there," asked Hunk, carefully trying to get back to the subject at hand, "The sentries?"

"Tons. They infiltrated the whole castle," said Lance, waving his spoon around the room for emphasis, "The entire diplomatic mission was a trap. Every one of those aliens was a galra sentry in disguise. And every sentry had a bomb implanted in them."

Hunk's face felt numb as he tried to imagine the horrifying things that Lance had seen. What _he_ had seen, but evidently forgotten.

"You said it happened when we warped?"

"Yeah, as soon as Allura put us into the wormhole to take us out of there, all hell broke loose. Every single one of the sentries went off at once. Some kind of chain reaction."

"Sounds like they were attached to some kind of timer or distance monitor," Hunk mused, mentally combing through various schematics and programs in his mind, "If Allura warped away, they couldn't contact their lead signal, and they'd all go off at the same time."

"I mean, I was fighting in the back, and-" Lance suddenly stopped short. "Yeah. Nevermind," Lance's voice lowered into a quiet monotone, "It doesn't really matter, now... Does that fill you in enough?"

Hunk detected the subtle irritation in his voice. Lance didn't want to talk about the battle anymore. He waited patiently to see if Lance would add anything else to his story, but Lance just sat there, chewing his lip. He didn't say anything else. Lance stared straight ahead into some dark corner of the room as the temperature around them steadily dropped.

"Yeah. It's alright," said Hunk, "You're cuddly today."

After placing his and Hunk's bowls on the floor, Lance had stretched his arms over his head and curled up into a tighter ball next to him. Hunk instinctively wrapped his arms around Lance's shoulders under the blanket and Lance settled himself in.

"I just missed you, is all," said Lance, resting his head against Hunk's shoulder, "And, y'know, it's freezing in here."

Hunk nodded, tucking the blanket into the air gaps between them.

"Oh, shit! Hang on! I'll be right back!"

Suddenly Lance was up and out from under Hunk's arm and tossing the blanket aside as he hurried back to the kitchen. Hunk heard some briefly concerning crashing noises and then Lance was back in the common room at a swift jog, hands carefully cupped together in front of him, and barely able to contain his excitement.

"Look. Look! I've been saving them for today!"

Lance peeled open his hands to reveal two small, round, bright-red candies. Leftovers from the last time they'd traded with friendly aliens, only a few days before this disastrous diplomatic mission. Hunk remembered Lance going through half his bag on the first day and going on and on about how similar it was to raspberry flavour before he'd wised up and started rationing out his candy more carefully.

"Oh my _god,_ Hunk. It's _exactly_ like I imagined. I've been _saving_ this for today," Lance practically moaned as he popped the little candy in his mouth while trying to recreate his position next to Hunk and under the blanket.

The candy was stale. Lance obviously hadn't taken care of it, like himself or the rest of the castle, but Hunk nevertheless appreciated the gesture. He could forgive Lance for forgetting to close the bag properly, and it was an amusing tradeoff to watch Lance have a near-euphoric experience in front of him as he sucked delicately on a raspberry-flavoured space treat.

And together they drifted into silence once again, as the sweet taste rolled around in Hunk's mouth and Lance curled his fingers into the blanket, hiking it up to his neck. Hunk tucked his bare feet in and Lance rested his hand over them, his palm radiating warmth to the tips of Hunk's frigid toes.

"Hey Hunk?" Lance's voice was little more than a sleepy whisper with his face pressed into Hunk's side.

"Mm?"

"Do you remember that time in second year Garrison when we stayed up all night playing truth or dare?"

"Yeah?"

"And I told you about my parents' divorce, and you told me about how you sometimes thought of kissing other guys?"

"Yeah."

"And we almost did, but I chickened out at the last second and said I had onions for dinner?"

"Yeah…?"

"Just… I dunno, it stuck with me."

"This remind you of that?" asked Hunk, curious about Lance's sudden wistful tone.

"Yeah. No. I dunno." Lance shook his head. "I thought about you a lot while you were asleep in the pod, Hunk. I know I missed being there for you when you woke up, but I wanted today to be nice for you."

Hunk couldn't think of what to say to respond, but his heart felt full and warm, so he just held Lance a little tighter under the blanket.

"And," Lance continued, "I remember back in middle school when we first met, and, besides your stupid haircut, you were the coolest guy there. You wanted to play with me."

"You had to mention it again, buddy," Hunk sighed, rolling his eyes.

"Yeah, but, I mean, You found me eating in the corner by the library when nobody else wanted to let me sit with them. I was a _loser,_ Hunk."

"We were both losers."

Lance laughed quietly, and Hunk laughed along with him.

"I thought because I was going to a new school, I had to be all grown up, and I couldn't like kid stuff anymore. Right when summer vacation ended, I told my mom to box up all my Transformers because I couldn't be caught playing with them."

"Dude, you were gonna get rid of them all?"

"Yeah. I thought I needed to be cool."

Lance found Hunk's hand and gave it a squeeze.

"And then when I met you, you… I dunno, you made it cool for me to still be a kid for a little while longer."

"Maybe that's why we're such good robot pilots."

"Heh. Yeah."

Another deep rumble echoed throughout the base of the castle ship, and Lance shut his eyes tightly, clenching his fists around the grey woolen blanket.

"Like I said, it'll stop after about an hour. Then it'll get warm again," Lance panted through clenched teeth as he continued to burrow himself into Hunk's body, now climbing directly into his lap. They could both see their breath now, as puffs of white in front of their faces and Hunk got the distinct impression that Lance was scared, but somehow used to this.

The rumbling and groaning continued. Lance shuddered in his lap.

"Since there's no stars out here," whispered Lance, after the noise died down a bit, "I like to imagine that we're actually deep, deep under the ocean. Where it's all mysterious and dark. And maybe the noises are huge monsters swimming around, wondering if our castle is a nice piece of food or not."

"Why?"

"Because imagining monsters makes me feel less alone."

Alone. Lance had spent all this time alone. He seemed fine enough at first, but the more time Hunk spent with Lance, the more cracks he started to see in the facade of Lance's casual optimism. It worried him.

Hunk had seen Lance like this before.

"Lance…"

He nudged Lance gently with his arm and Lance hummed in response.

"Look. I didn't want to say too much right away, but when you were alone for these past few weeks…" Hunk paused, gauging Lance's reaction. Lance turned to look into his eyes, woollen blanket tucked up and covering the bottom half of his face. "Did your depression come back? You just look… rough, man."

"You could say that," Lance mumbled from under the blanket.

Lance got lost sometimes. When life started to overwhelm him, he'd fall off-track, and things would quickly snowball from there. First it would be subtle things, like forgetting his keys or missing a homework deadline, but the more his confusion and exhaustion and guilt took over, the worse it got. Eventually Lance would stop showing up to class or eating or sleeping. His illness would quickly invade his entire life until Lance ground to a halt and stopped functioning entirely.

Hunk found himself staring at Lance's blue eyes, lined by heavy dark circles, and the subtle fear and worry expressed in them; it'd happened again. He wished so badly that he could have been there, that he could have been well enough to stay out of the pod and keep his friend company while the others healed. But he was here now. And Hunk was going to make sure that Lance didn't have to feel like the world was too much for him anymore.

"It's ok, man," he said, "We all have our days. We can do it like we used to, you know. I'll help you make a list."

"Yeah," Lance nodded, "That'd be great."

Hunk was the kind of friend that was in it for the long run. This, and everything that'd happened while he was away in the pod was merely a temporary setback. He'd get Lance a meal, get him to rest, and then they'd make a list. Together.

"... And, Hunk."

"Yeah?"

Lance looked to him implicitly and Hunk leaned in a little closer.

"I just wanna say, because I don't know if I ever really have before, how much I appreciate having you in my life. And I'm sorry it took you being away from me to say it, Hunk."

The words surprised Hunk with their quiet sincerity. Lance wasn't usually the type for deep compliments. He was a flirt, for sure, but Lance always struggled so hard when he had anything meaningful he needed to say.

"Something wrong?" He asked, a little unnerved by Lance's uncharacteristic seriousness.

"No," Lance replied, "Just… keep holding me. Please. It's nice to have you back. I missed you."

He would. Hunk kept his arms wrapped around Lance, and let his friend lean back and rest his head on Hunk's shoulder. He rubbed his hands up and down Lance's tucked-up shins and listened to his breath steady itself in the frigid, stale air.

And they stayed that way for a long, long time.


	2. 6:18PM 23062065

Hey guys, hope you enjoy the second chapter. This is an archival / backup copy of the story and the latest chapters / artwork are posted on my ao3 account under teh same name, 5557.

Hunk assumed that Lance fell asleep. He was still and quiet, and Hunk couldn't see his face from his forward position. He was careful not to shift him too much as Hunk slowly adjusted Lance's body against his own and relaxed against the back of the couch, freeing his numb leg. Lance twitched over top of him, lifting his head.

"Hunk," said Lance, quietly, "Later on, there's something I gotta tell you. About where we're at."

Well, _that_ delicate effort was wasted.

"You mean like, _us?_ " Hunk blushed, his body tensing up.

"About our ship," Lance replied.

"Our... _relationship?_ " Hunk guessed, wondering where, exactly, this thread was headed.

"No, the _ship._ Where we're at."

"That's not making it any clearer, dude."

"The _castle,_ " said Lance, plainly. "In space."

"Oh. Right." Hunk blanched, trying to shove down many, many assumptions unravelling in his mind.

"But I still like you, dude."

Relieved, Hunk beamed. "Thanks, man."

And Lance offered his fist to bump underneath the blanket.

There was a low, rattling hiss that started from overhead and Lance perked up slightly from his snuggling. The air around the room had started flowing again, and after a few minutes, heat returned; flooding in from the vents and making the castle feel slightly more livable. Lance stretched his arms and legs out from under the blanket and rolled over to face Hunk.

"Hey, you know what," he yawned, looking up from his chin on Hunk's chest, "I'm real sorry that I didn't clean up, uh, well _anything_ before you came out. So, I was thinking, why don't I go take a shower and shave? Like, I'm sorry dude, I know I'm kinda disgusting right now."

Hunk wasn't going to lie. As much as he loved and missed Lance, he _did_ smell pretty ripe.

"Probably a good idea. When was the last time you-" Hunk cut himself short, "Actually, nevermind. Don't tell me. I don't think I wanna know."

"Yeah. Probably don't," he chuckled, and Lance pushed himself up into a sitting position, reaching down off the couch to grab his sneakers. "Oh, and also, I was gonna say. If you need to, the only bathroom that works is the one in Coran's room on the main floor. Everything else is damaged or shut off by the castle."

Hunk wasn't exactly surprised by the news. Everything else in the castle was either partially damaged or completely broken. His mental list of projects and fixes had grown so fast and with such depth over the past few hours, it was starting to give him a headache.

"Huh. Good to know," he said, filing away the fact as Lance dragged himself up off the couch, "Oh, yeah, and while you shower, I think I'm gonna go up to my room and grab my clothes-"

"NO!"

Lance's shout ripped through the air and shocked Hunk with its vicious force. The noise echoed through the empty common room, leaving a deadly silence between the two, pierced only by the occasional creaking and groaning of the castle walls. Lance seemed to realize his transgression as soon as he'd done it, because he immediately shrank back and away from Hunk, eyes wide and glistening with apprehension.

"No, wait!" Lance coughed, trying desperately to sound calm, "Maybe don't go in there just yet? It's a mess!"

How would Lance know?

"Dude, I know you don't, but I _clean_ my room," Hunk shot back. Lance's shrill laughter was entirely unconvincing.

"I mean, _the battle!_ Your room got toasted! Please! Just… not yet."

Lance's body was tense and his eyes flickered around the common room floor, refusing to meet Hunk.

"Why are you so against me going in my room?" He asked, rising from the couch and pulling the grey blanket around his shoulders.

"I was, uh, trying to organize some stuff. Put things- away. You were unconscious, Hunk!"

Lance was acting more suspicious than ever, and it was really starting to bother him.

"That's-" Hunk paused, "Weird."

Hunk wanted to say more, but he feared the effects of a more accusatory tone on his fragile friend. Lance didn't seem like he wanted to put up a fight, but he sure was adamant about this.

"Look," Lance stuttered, "I'll run up and go grab your stuff, ok? I'll go now, and I'll be right back. Just- Just wait here. Deal?"

Why was Lance shaking where he stood? Why was he slowly inching his body between Hunk and the door? Hunk had so many questions, but the more he wanted to press Lance for answers, the more Lance avoided the subject or pushed back.

Hunk chose to take a different course.

"Fine," he said, folding his arms and planting his feet firmly on the ground, "I'll wait if you go grab my clothes, _right now,_ before you shower. Sound good?"

He watched Lance silently debate his options, and then, just as quickly, turn on his heel and disappear out the common room door.

"I'll be right back," he called over his shoulder as he sprinted away, voice fading into the shifting shadows as his sneakers kicked up a trail of fine dust.

And Hunk waited.

He shrugged the grey blanket up a bit more, and went to go sit back down on the couch. Hunk soon discovered, though, that no matter where he stood, no matter where he tried to sit, by the very nature of the room he always had his back exposed to something. Some inconvenient shadow or draft of cold air. He felt besieged by the looming darkness all around him, and, honestly, Hunk was really starting to dislike the whole "open-concept" design.

How did Lance do this? How did he get by all alone when even a few minutes of solitude in the empty castle was starting to make Hunk's heart race and his palms sweat? Hunk's mind wandered back to the combat training bot sitting deactivated in the other room. Why exactly did Lance need to keep it so close?

Eventually, Hunk found himself pacing around the room as the lights above him brightened and dimmed erratically, wondering moment by moment when Lance would return. And then he stopped, suddenly. He realised he had no idea what time it was. And that every clock he'd seen had either been broken or different from the last one. Hunk made a mental note to ask Lance about it when he wasn't being so shifty. Not that he'd know the answer either way; Lance tended to stop caring about time in any form when he was severely depressed.

Hunk obediently remained in the common room, biding his time and shaking his head at Lance's weird, stir-crazy behaviour until he heard the sound of Lance's footsteps returning and the knot in his stomach settled once more.

"Hey, um, I brought your stuff..."

Lance was back, panting slightly and tightly clutching a pile of orange and green around his chest. One of Hunk's boots was dangling precariously from his arm, but Lance scooped it up at the last second and shoved the entire lump of clothes unceremoniously towards Hunk.

"And you can change wherever you want, I guess," he said, casually motioning his head around the room, "It's not like there's anybody out there watching."

Hunk's eye twitched at Lance's choice of phrase. But he graciously accepted his pile of hastily folded clothes out of Lance's hands and watched as Lance breathed a heavy sigh of relief.

Then he swallowed deeply. "Just… Just wait here. I'll go shower, ok? Then we can talk, or cuddle, or… something. Just… _wait_. I won't be long."

Hunk nodded reluctantly, grabbing his pants out of the pile and throwing his shirt and vest down on the couch.

The whole situation was strange. Why did Lance seem so oddly clingy and desperate for control? Hunk knew his friend had always had a slight penchant for histrionics, and his ADHD sometimes got the better of him, but both Lance and the castle were a _mess._ Something wasn't adding up.

As he turned towards the most private corner of the room he could find to start fiddling with the white medical leotard, the last thing Hunk saw was Lance slipping away in the other direction, out the door and down the hall. Hunk was left alone once more, and he didn't like it.

And he was kinda naked.

Speaking of things not adding up, Hunk discovered, once he was mostly dressed, that his lucky headband was missing from the pile of clothes. He grimaced slightly and swore under his breath after triple-checking all of his pockets and belts. He'd chalk it up to Lance's ADHD and depression making him forget, but Hunk still felt exposed and vulnerable without it.

The deep, terrifying, thunderous rumble began to echo throughout the belly of the ship once more and Hunk's stomach dropped as he heard the vents overhead whine and eventually shut off. He half-thought about chasing after Lance and sticking with him in Coran's room as he cleaned himself up, until a better idea struck.

As the minutes ticked by and the air grew still and cold, Hunk weighed his options. Lance would definitely be mad if Hunk left the room against his wishes, especially without telling him. But Lance would also take his time in the shower. Surely he could just sneak up to his room, grab his headband, and be back down before Lance was finished. It would give him something to do instead of just waiting around in the cold while his anxiety gave him a heart attack. He'd forgiven Lance for worse. He wouldn't be missed.

"Sorry, Lance," Hunk whispered to himself as he left for the stairs.

Navigating the heavily damaged and darkened castle by himself was a whole new endeavour for Hunk. What had previously intimidated him when he'd first arrived on Arus was now utterly terrifying. Formerly dim hallways were now mysterious black chasms inviting him to get lost, while abandoned parts of broken Galra sentries littered the unused side corridors Hunk tried his best to ignore. In his time alone, Lance had obviously cleaned only the barest minimum to get by and seemingly kept to the mantra of "out of sight, out of mind."

Hunk hated the way his footsteps echoed in the grand entrance hall. Even the thick layer of dust wasn't enough for him to walk in complete silence, and every step announced his location loudly to the rest of the castle. Every bounce of sound off the vaulted ceiling made him feel like something else was out there, with him, making noise.

As he ascended the stairs, Hunk felt a subtle touch of cold air behind him, tousling the hairs on the back of his neck, and sending shivers down his spine. He whipped around on his heels so fast he nearly lost his balance on the smooth marble steps, eyes darting around the darkened main hall, straining to see any sort of movement; all the while feeling embarrassed when he knew he was alone.

He was alone.

But Lance had told him to wait, hadn't he?

Hunk shivered in spite of himself, determinedly climbing a few more steps. As he did so, the light in the main entrance hall dimmed, flickered menacingly, and finally extinguished itself, throwing the whole room into unsettling darkness. The only source of illumination now glowed weakly from the upper hall.

Hunk squinted down into the blackness of the main entryway, straining his eyes to adjust to the pitch darkness, until he could scarcely tell what was a shadow and what was his mind playing tricks on him. He gulped a few silent breaths. There was no movement, he concluded. Nothing there. Nothing left to do but press forward. Hunk reluctantly turned his back on the entrance hall below and settled his feet slowly and deliberately into each step, mistrustful of the shadows cloaking the dusty debris around him.

Past the giant crack in the wall where the broken light still spat angry sparks down from the ceiling, Hunk turned left, instead of right, towards the dormitories. Thankfully, this area was still relatively well-lit, and Lance had obviously been here plenty of times as well. The hall was free from violent Galra rubble and full of dusty footprints.

There were dozens of prints running up and down the whole length of the hall. Fresh ones. More than a simple trek back and forth to his room, Hunk noted. And an area, He discovered as he explored a little further, where a huge patch in the dust had been stirred very recently.

The edges of old fingerprint lines still remained behind the hastily scuffed swathes on the hallway floor, but the message was too thoroughly scrubbed to read. Lance had written something in the hallway, like he'd written on the banister, but he'd rubbed it out just before Hunk had arrived.

Another loud rattle shook through some nearby pipes in the wall and Hunk had to force his curious mind to stop trying to piece together the words Lance didn't want him to see. Peering further down the dormitory hall, he saw that one of the of the bedroom doors was already open: Keith's. There was a two-inch gap where the door stood ajar, and the entry keypad was no longer glowing.

Upon closer inspection, Hunk found dirty fingerprints and traces of food on the edges of the door where it had been dragged open and shut multiple times. Hunk slid his fingers in and gave the door a shove. It creaked and moved a couple inches, stopping suddenly with a heavy, grinding thud. Hunk tried again, with more force, but the door wouldn't budge. It was jammed against something deep inside the wall. He wasn't going to be able to get through…

But someone Lance's size could.

Against his better judgement, Hunk peeked into the bedroom and saw the mess. More empty food bowls were piled up around the foot of Keith's bed, and the pillows were thrown randomly on the floor. The sheets were a tangled nest, with Keith's clothes scattered over the bed and an abandoned tablet that looked like it belonged to Pidge laying in the middle of it all. It didn't look like fighting had occurred up here, as Lance had first argued. In fact, it looked like Lance was the one that made the mess in the first place.

Hunk leaned away from the crack in the door and shook his head, reeling with second-hand embarrassment. Whatever Lance had done in his spare time, he'd eventually have to explain. If not to him, then to Keith.

Another cold draft blew down the hallway and Hunk snapped back into focus. He was running out of time.

Hunk hastily thumbed the key sequence on the pad to open the door to his own bedroom. Rather than the soft hiss and smooth slide he was used to, the mechanism gave an awful thump and the door ground along its tracks until it was mostly open. Hunk sighed and added that to his growing mental list of castle fixes. The ship really did seem to be in far worse shape than he'd imagined. Lance wasn't exaggerating at all when he said that everything was broken.

Inside his room, though, Hunk could tell Lance had been in there as well.

From the looks of it, Lance had been in there many times.

Hunk was, for the most part, a tidy person. Lance was not. Hunk liked his books lined up straight on the shelf, and his shoes side by side near the door. He liked his bed made and his dirty clothes in the laundry hamper. He always made sure to keep his engineering projects restricted to his desk and to carefully clean his tools and throw away any greasy rags when he was done.

His room was almost unrecognizable. His paladin armor was all over the floor and several of his stored projects were half-pulled out of the boxes falling out of his closet. There was a roll of toilet paper unravelling around the room and ending in a wad at a spilled bowl of food that Lance had tried to cover up, but not actually clean. He saw where Lance had pulled out the clothes he was currently wearing from under the tangle of sheets and pillows on the bed. There were still several mismatched socks peeking out from under the pile.

Hunk stood over the wrinkled mess on the bed before him as an icy chill ran through his blood. Lance had slept in it. It was glaringly obvious. He picked up his pillow, buried his face in it, and smelled it. Lance had slept in his bed _a lot_. If Keith's room was any indication, he'd slept in all of their beds.

Hunk wanted to be angry, to chastise Lance for the violation of his space and property, but he didn't have time to dwell on his frustration. He needed his headband, and he needed to be gone. Hunk wilfully forced his irritation down as he looked around his disgusting room, torn between hastily cleaning his personal space and further tearing it apart to look for his lucky headband before Lance knew he was missing.

He compromised by ripping the sheets off the bed and sorting through the odd array of socks and undershirts he found under the bedding. A quick sift with his fingers through the folds told him his headband was nowhere to be found.

Perhaps, he thought, it wasn't even in his room.

Pidge's tablet was in Keith's room, and there was a bunch of stuff back up in medical bay. Lance certainly hadn't kept anyone's belongings to their designated spaces. It was likely Lance had taken his headband for some personal project or purpose unbeknownst to him, but no matter what, Hunk needed to get to the bottom of this.

Pidge's door, surprisingly enough, opened just fine and Hunk found all of her tech collection and hoards of junk thoroughly explored and played with. A few of her pieces of alien garbage had actually made their way into his own room, and Keith's, and Hunk suspected now, that he'd find more of them all around the castle. All the more reason to believe that his headband was somewhere else.

Hunk sifted as carefully as he could through the disaster that was Pidge's already messy room now overtaken by Lance. Surely if Lance was moving their stuff around, his lucky headband would be nearby. Even in total disarray, there had to be a method to Lance's madness. Surely.

But it was a method that proved beyond him. After too many minutes spent going through the avalanche in Pidge's storage closet, Hunk figured Lance was almost done downstairs and he needed to move on.

Lance's bedroom door was locked.

Only one bedroom left.

Shiro's room was more of the same. His clothes were a rumpled mess on the floor and Lance had obviously tried them on or worn them or slept on them or done some other weird, creepy shit with them. There was another food stain on Shiro's vest. Hunk sighed, picking the vest up and folding it carefully before placing it on the bed and concluding that nothing was sacred, even with Shiro gone.

He bit his tongue, though, when he turned around to leave.

Hunk saw it right away. In the corner of Shiro's nearly empty room, in the dust, Lance had drawn a huge set of concentric circles with delicate spirals and dotted lines edging outward from it. Inside the intricate dust circles he'd placed mementos of the other paladins in compass-like positions around the centre. Keith's knife. Coran's cube. Pidge's glasses. Allura's jewelry and...

Hunk's lucky orange headband. True to Lance's story, it was stained with blood from a head injury. Careful not to disturb the delicate patterns, Hunk grabbed it out of its sanctified place in the circles, turning it over in his hands and trying to bring back some recollection of what happened before he was released from the pod. He couldn't remember any of it.

Hunk stared at the disturbing little shrine of objects, and the words Lance had written with his bare fingers into the floor.

 _Circle of Protection_

He stood in the cold air as the castle walls rumbled and groaned around him. He had so many questions. He almost regretted coming up here and finding everything so changed. So invaded by Lance. He should have stayed in the common room and waited.

And then the rumbling stopped. The vents hissed again. It must have been almost an hour. Lance would surely be done. He had to get back.

He had to get back.

Shiro's door slammed shut behind him.

Hunk whipped around to see the grey metallic sheet now enclosing him into the bedroom. He knew it. Someone was on the other side. They'd followed behind him, and locked him in. He was trapped. Hunk's heart pounded in his chest as he threw himself against the door, listening for what could possibly be on the other side. The walls were creaking and settling. The vents hissed. Hunk swore he could hear footsteps moving away from him, but whatever movement on the other side was easily disguised by the noise all around him. He waited, guessing, praying that it was a mechanical malfunction.

The noise died down. There was either something or someone on the other side, or nothing at all. He was late. He had to get back to Lance. Hunk swore silently under his breath, and then he opened the door.

There was nothing on the other side.

Hunk quickly stuffed his headband in his pocket and left Shiro's room, the door hissing quietly shut behind him. He paused, letting his eyes adjust from the bright lights of Shiro's room to the dim illumination of the hallway. And then he saw it. The shadow.

The figure stood at the very end of the hallway, shrouded in darkness as glistening drops of water fell from its hair. It was Lance.

He wasn't saying anything. Just standing there. Dripping.

Hunk began to panic. He couldn't see Lance's face in the darkness. He couldn't tell if Lance was angry or not. Had Lance been spying on him? Had he known the whole time that Hunk had left the common room? Was this some sort of creepy punishment for disobeying him?

Slowly, Lance began to walk towards him. Hunk subconsciously took a step backward and his foot hit Shiro's door. His stomach sank. Even if he went back inside Shiro's room, he was still trapped.

Step by step, drip by drip Lance moved with deliberation down the centre of the hall. His hands were firmly jammed in his pockets and his wet sneakers squeaked on the floor. Closer. Closer. Hunk swallowed dry. Lance wasn't blinking.

Finally, he spoke.

"It does that, you know," he said, indicating behind Hunk, "Shiro's door. Just kinda randomly closes when you least expect it. Opens itself sometimes, too. Freaked me out the first couple times it happened."

Lance was still walking towards him with that same menacingly slow gate. Hunk's breath came and went in short gasps and his palms were wet with barely contained dread.

"And like, I hate it when I'm trying to shave and the heat shuts off and the water gets all cold. I hate the way it feels. I know Shiro said it was, like a closer shave or it closes your pores or something, but, I can't stand it. I just want the water to be warm..."

Lance was smoothing his hand over his chin as he finally reached Hunk, and Hunk had his hands up in the air like he was about to be arrested. Lance leaned on the doorframe beside him as Hunk shook with nerves.

"I told you not to leave the common room."

"You don't own me, Lance," he said, though whether Lance could hear the quiver in his voice, Hunk couldn't tell.

"What did you see?" Lance asked.

Hunk shrugged uncomfortably. "A bunch of weird shit."

He thought Lance would question him more. Ask if he went into all the rooms, ask what he found. But he didn't. Lance stared into his eyes and Hunk stared back, searching for the cold anger in his friend's gaze. But there was none. And Lance didn't look like he wanted to fight. He just looked… sad.

"I got scared there, right after you guys went in, y'know," Lance tried to muster another choking laugh, "But I never lost hope that you guys would get better in all that- Y'know. A couple weeks' time. I'm sorry, Hunk. Sorry... I've been super lazy. I know I really gotta clean up, and-"

"Lance."

Lance stopped himself. He knew Hunk wasn't buying it.

Hunk's eyes flit side to side, down each end of the hallway, both as gloomy and empty as ever, and then back to Lance.

It all made sense, now.

Lance keeping himself to the medical bay as much as possible. Lance clinging to him as he dragged Hunk down the hall. Keeping the combat training bot nearby; not wanting Hunk to go to his room…

It all made sense.

"Lance, I think I know what's going on."

Lance's eyes shot open and his breath hitched in his throat.

"Hunk, wait. Just wait. This isn't how I wanted it to go. I was going to tell you, Hunk."

No, Hunk had had quite enough. The time for Lance's game was over.

"Wearing our clothes and sleeping in our beds?" said Hunk, his voice now laden with accusational bite, "The stale candy, and the empty food machine? It's not broken, is it, Lance. It's empty."

He watched Lance wince with every word as if physically battered by them.

"Hunk, please," Lance begged, "This wasn't how it was supposed to happen."

Lance started hitting himself on the forehead with his palms.

"Oh, fuck me, I fucked it up. God damnit. I'm sorry, Hunk. Please don't be mad."

Hunk grabbed Lance's wrists and held him firm even as Lance still tried to hurt himself. He felt the brutal force of Lance's self-punishment as he thrashed against Hunk's steady grip.

"Lance, look at me."

He stopped. Lance's muscles relaxed in his hands and Lance stared into Hunk's eyes.

"I haven't been out for a couple weeks, have I?"

Lance didn't answer.

"How long has it been? How long have you been living like this?"

Hunk could see the tears welling up in Lance's eyes, even as he tried to make his voice soft and gentle and forgiving. Lance shook his head as tiny droplets hung on the tips of his eyelashes.

"Lance," Hunk began, drawing his friend close and crushing him in a hug, "How long was I really gone?"

There was a long pause before he spoke. Longer than Hunk wanted to know. Every second that ticked by sank into his heart as he felt Lance's ribs, shaking with his rattling breath under Hunk's steady arms. And Hunk suddenly realised that he knew nothing about waiting.

"Lance…"

"Hunk," Lance began, choking back sobs, "I just wanna say that I love you. I really love you. As a friend or family or whatever. And I wanted you waking up to be as nice as possible. I want you to be happy, Hunk! We had a good afternoon together, right?"

"Lance. How long was I gone?"

"Please. Wait. Please don't be mad, Hunk. I've been imagining this for a long time. I had so many nightmares about you being mad. Please, please don't be mad!"

"I'm not mad, buddy."

"Hunk, I was the only one! The only one! I was lucky to be alive! I should have died like everyone else! I mean, the pods say they're alive, but… It's been so long! You're the only one that had a date on yours! I've been waiting, and holding out for you to wake up. Please don't be mad. You were the only thing keeping me sane!"

"I put everybody in there by myself. And when the power was leaking, I patched it to send everything up to medical bay! I've been living on life support, waiting for you to wake up. I love you. I've missed you every day."

"I need you to help fix the power, Hunk. Please. I think we're running out. The crystal's cracked and there's no stars around to power the ship. It's getting darker and darker in here every day. But we can save everyone together! I know we can! I made sure all the power went to medical bay!"

"Lance."

"A year."


	3. 7:23PM 23062065

I use as a backup archive for my stories. You can find the latest chapters on my Ao3 account under the same name.

A year.

His face was numb and his hands were cold, but his brain kept spinning with endless intrusive thoughts. One year. His best friend had been eating and sleeping in the dark. Twelve months. Trapped in a prison of a ship without sunlight or rain, sitting next to the unconscious bodies of his friends. Fifty two weeks eating the same tasteless green goo every meal. Three hundred and sixty five days without so much as a hug.

A year.

It was almost as if...

Ok.

Ok. Hunk braced himself, as he held Lance, sobbing in his arms, to have some sort of reaction to the reality of the situation. A breakdown. A scream. Some shock of horror that would justify the revelation. He waited to feel the typical nausea hit. Waited to taste the familiar tang of bile rising in the back of his throat. He waited to keel over and let his stomach empty its contents as it usually did when he was faced with extreme distress. But he didn't. He didn't feel anything at the moment. He just felt numb.

A year.

Ok.

"I mean, it makes… sense," he said, finally, unable to count how many minutes had passed between him and Lance, staring at each other in the cold, dark hallway.

Lance twitched in his arms, and his mouth opened and closed several times, but no words came out. Only a strangled, gurgling whine. He was _so_ pale. Hunk couldn't tell what was water from his shower and what was tears, but he ran his hand delicately under Lance's chin, catching the droplets with his finger and flicked them away.

He had to lay his cards on the table.

"Lance," Hunk sighed heavily, "I need to ask you something, and I need you to be absolutely honest with me."

Lance nodded solemnly.

"No more games."

"I promise," said Lance, and his grip tightened around Hunks' wrists just a little bit more, "No more bullshit."

"Are you…"

Hunk paused, gazing deep into Lance's blue eyes.

"Yeah?"

"-a ghost?"

"... What?"

"Like, are you dead?"

Lance's face screwed up and he fell into a coughing fit.

"What the _fuck,_ Hunk? No!"

"Oh." Hunk blanched. "Um, ok."

"Hunk!" Lance shrieked, " _Why_ would you think I was a _ghost?_ "

Hunk sure felt that wave of nausea now, as Lance's spit hit his cheek. "B-because when you're in the hallways," he stuttered, feeling Lance's glare drilling into him, "I can't hear your footsteps! It's like you're floating! And you look all pale and thin!"

Lance threw his bony hands up in the air.

"That doesn't mean I'm fucking _dead_ , dude! I spent six months learning how to _dance._ It makes you light on your feet!"

"I'm sorry. Yeah," Hunk found his head nodding involuntarily on top of his neck. There had to be a better way to handle this. "-I mean, you looking so fucked up and all..."

Lance let out an undignified snort.

"Um, _I showered? Hello?_ "

Lance was obviously trying his best to keep his expression dour and straight-faced, but his lip was trembling and his cheeks were twitching upward.

"I look at least a little better, right?"

Hunk brought him in for another bone-crushing hug.

"Yeah Lance, you do, but you still look like you weigh eighty-five pounds and need seven weeks of sleep, dude."

"Not dead, Hunk."

"I get it. And, Lance..."

"Yeah?"

"I know you lied to me so you could pretend things were fine for a little while, but," Hunk swallowed, "Just so you know, I'm not mad."

He wasn't. Of course not. How could he possibly be angry at the herculean effort Lance had put forth for him and the team? Lance's sacrifice was clearly visible on his thin body and in his sunken eyes. Hunk couldn't imagine the strength of perseverance that had kept Lance going through all that time alone; couldn't imagine the bottomless reserves of love Lance had tapped into to watch over the team without going completely nuts.

Lance was putting on his best melodramatic pout as he wiped away his tears with his dirty sleeve, and yet, somehow, impossibly, some crack of a smile was breaking across his lips as he quietly muttered something about "-come back and haunt your ass…"

Lance hiccuped. And Hunk snorted.

And in that moment, they both broke into uncontrollable laughter. The kind of bubbling warmth from the gut that starts as a throaty chuckle and turns into a gasping wheeze and made Hunk's head feel light and his eyes well up with tears. Lance leaned heavily against his frame, laughing and clutching himself, trying to steady the both of them as they fell against Shiro's door.

Of course the door opened at that moment.

Hunk's desperate attempt to catch himself by throwing his arm out behind him came to no avail as he tumbled inward, hitting the floor painfully on his elbow, with Lance landing on top of him in a heap and still, laughing. Both of them laughing.

"Why are _you_ laughing?" Lance hiccoughed between gulps of air.

Hunk had to give himself a few moments to be able to talk more than wheeze. "Ok, but... You know when we were in astrophysics, and you kept making up all those scenarios where you wanted to die?"

"Montgomery's class? Yeah?"

"And you said you wanted someone to crash a learner's shuttle through the window while transporting a full load of launch fuel, killing you instantly because you couldn't spend another minute waiting for the bell to ring?"

Lance wiped the snot running from his nose on his sleeve.

"Yeah?"

Hunk swallowed, tears still streaming down his face.

"This is it, Lance. This is that. This is the worst thing. We're out here in unfathomable darkness, in a dead spaceship, and everyone we love is impossibly far away or unconscious."

Lance became very still on top of him.

"Like, this is it, man. This is the edge of the universe." The words felt strangely light as they left Hunk's mouth, residual giggles still bubbling up through him, "We're gonna die out here."

"Holy shit," whispered Lance. He lay there, stunned, and let his form go limp, fingers trailing the dusty floor, head rising and falling against Hunk's chest in time with his breath.

"I know," said Hunk. And he let his own body relax, feeling the cold metal floor underneath his back, and Lance's warm, very much alive body on top of him.

Hunk rolled his head to the side as they lay half inside the doorframe, and gazed at the shrine of personal mementos Lance had built in Shiro's room.

"I'm, not even- I don't know. I don't know what to feel, Lance." He could see Lance staring at the shrine as well. Hunk found his hand thoughtlessly tracing over his pants pocket, where he'd hastily stuffed his headband inside.

"A _year._ Honestly, It feels like just yesterday we were hanging out in the castle, and a little while ago we were back on earth at the Garrison. My brain can't wrap itself around the idea of what happened or how long it's been."

Lance nodded against his chest.

"You need more time, huh?"

Hunk shrugged, wrinkling his nose as a puff of dust from the floor got sucked up his nostril, make it itch uncomfortably.

"Well, it looks like time is what we have plenty of-"

"But we don't!" Lance cut him off as he grabbed Hunk by the collar, a sudden visceral desperation burning in his eyes, "We don't. It's running out, Hunk. I can show you the crystal. It's- …God, I try not to think about it. Part of why I didn't want you leaving the common room was that I was afraid you might go up there without your suit on."

Hunk could feel Lance's white-knuckled grip vibrating through his vest as his hands clenched around the edge of his collar. His gaze intensified as he lifted Hunk's head off the ground and closer to his terrified face.

"How bad is it?" asked Hunk.

"Bad."

Hunk would have believed him before, but Lance's eyes were boring into him now, convincing him that things were far worse than Lance could effectively communicate with words. He nodded slowly, gently squeezing Lance's hands to ease them off of his collar as he pushed Lance up and off of his chest.

"Take me there."

"Right now?"

"Yeah," he said, standing up and brushing himself off, "Dude, you waited a year for me to get out and help you fix it, so I'm gonna help you fix it, apocalypse or no. Look, what time is-" Hunk stopped himself before he finished, suddenly remembering Lance's track record of losing time, and not wanting to offend him further. "Nevermind, it's not imp-"

"It's 7:30 PM on June 23rd, 2065, or 6:30 if you're not including daylight saving in space," said Lance, flatly, staring Hunk in the eyes in a way that unnerved him. It was no longer desperate, it was indignant. Like a challenge. A matter of pride. "But there's really no daylight out here to save, now, is there..."

"How do you-"

"Because I _waited,_ Hunk." Lance shifted onto his knees and stood up to his full height, voice tense with irritation, "I had _nothing to do_ but wait. I had nothing to do but sit back and watch the clock and _count._ You said it yourself with astrophysics, and how we'd be staring at the clock every five minutes until it ended. That was me. 24 hours a day. Just five more minutes. I can last five more minutes, can't I? For a year. I _waited,_ Hunk."

"I'm sorry," said Hunk. It didn't seem to do much.

"And you know what?" Lance was getting louder now, his index finger firmly planted on the tip of Hunk's nose, "Fuck you and your "we're gonna die out here" _bullshit._ You don't get to be awake for, like, five hours, less than _half a fucking day,_ and tell _me_ that the universe is fucked. You don't get to do that, man. You don't _get_ to."

Lance was pacing back and forth in front of him, fists tearing at his hair. Hunk was tempted to grab him and put Lance in another hold, to stop him from injuring himself, but he wanted to give Lance his freedom. He chose to wait this one out.

"I stayed good for _a year,_ Hunk. Don't think I haven't thought about the pills in our suits. Because I did. A lot. And I know it's an option. It's an option that I don't choose."

The suits had a failsafe, they both knew. When they first became paladins, Allura had pointed out two tiny compartments. One in the neck, and one inside the helmet. Both within biting reach, and containing a simple cyanide pill; in case of capture or torture or total mission failure.

"Five minutes, Hunk. Five _more_ minutes." Lance was on the verge of tears again, having worked himself up into a frenzy. "And you want to know how I did it?"

Hunk wasn't so much curious as afraid of what would happen if he refused. It didn't really matter. Lance began again just as soon as he'd asked.

"You dig deep, Hunk. You dig _into_ yourself and you _dredge up_ every happy moment, every good memory from your life, every shred of hope you have for the future and you live off of that for _five more minutes."_

He was starting to feel the weight now, as a certain unplaceable discomfort settled in his tightening chest. Hunk didn't want to think about it. He wasn't ready yet.

"Lance," said Hunk, trying to calm Lance's frantic pacing in front of him.

"I don't choose it. I don't." Lance sobbed, tears streaming from his eyes once again, "Because I want all of us to get out of here."

"Lance…"

"WHAT?"

The last word emerged like a bullet from a gun, accusation cutting into Hunk with physical force. Hunk knew when he found out, on a logical level, that Lance had been hurt by his circumstances. Anyone would be fucked up by that kind of loneliness. He wasn't prepared for all of it to be pouring out at once, suddenly, without provocation. He stood there, in front of Lance as the air settled between them, and Lance slowly calmed his rage and steadied his breath.

"Thank you."

"Huh?" Realization seemed to hit Lance, and he became distinctly aware of himself and his surroundings.

"For waiting," said Hunk, barely above a whisper, "For holding out for me. For all of us."

Lance swallowed deeply.

"You're a motherfucking hero, Lance."

Lance's shoulders sank again, and he took a few more deep breaths as he closed his eyes and let the words wash over him. Hunk saw the moment there, as Lance leaned his head back and his eyes twitched under his eyelids, where Lance let go. He finally congratulated himself. He'd done it. It was over. He didn't have to be all alone anymore.

"Any time," said Lance, straightening himself up to look Hunk in the eye. His smile was fake, but the words were real.

"Ok," said Hunk, "it's 7:30. Let's go take a look at the crystal."

"You really don't-" Lance shook his head, but when he saw Hunk's determined expression, he chose to turn the motion into a shrug. "But, yeah. Go suit up," he sighed.

"Why?"

"Because the bridge is a mess."

Inside his room, Hunk slipped on his yellow paladin armor with less of a struggle than he remembered. He must've lost a couple pounds over the year in stasis, he figured, as he clipped his chestpiece closed with that familiar snug and satisfying click. Hunk kicked the unravelling roll of toilet tissue out of the way as he found his legplates and boots near the bed, dusty, but otherwise clean. After donning them, he grabbed his helmet and swept his bangs to the side as he slid it on, testing the internal batteries on its display. 15% power. More than enough for a trip upstairs.

Lance was already suited up and ready in the hall when Hunk shut his door behind him with that same grinding thud.

"I haven't been up there in awhile, you know," said Lance, anxiety evident in his voice, "The radiation could've leaked through the doors and down the hallway. We should visor up when we hit the upper levels, just in case."

He started down the hall at a brisk pace, and Hunk followed quickly behind.

 _'Bad_ ,' he'd said. ' _Bad.'_ Hunk knew a bit more about Balmeran power crystals thanks to his time with Coran in the engine rooms, but he wasn't going to get his hopes up. His gaze shifted to Lance by his side as they ascended the stairs together, past medical bay and up towards the main bridge.

Lance was eerily quiet as they walked; more than his silent footsteps, Hunk noted. He guessed that Lance felt ashamed about his earlier outburst.

"Sorry about freaking out back there, man."

There it was.

"I-"

"It's fine, Lance," he quickly interjected before Lance could get himself worked up into another bout of self-punishment.

"-I haven't had anybody real to talk to," Lance continued anyway, ignoring Hunk's dismissive hand-wave, "For a long time. I think I'm kinda… unsocial right now."

That was putting it lightly.

"You're depressed, dude. We'll work on it."

"It's just that?" Lance looked over at Hunk as they rounded another corner, his questioning gaze a mixture of hope and worry.

"Well, it might be," said Hunk, "but we'll work with what we know, for now. It'll be like at the Garrison."

Lance made a noise of acknowledgement. And then, "Thanks, Hunk."

The silence settled in once more as they climbed, and after a few more sets of stairs, Hunk found himself curiously working up a sweat. At first he blamed it on fatigue and muscle atrophy from the healing pod, but then he noticed that he wasn't exactly getting tired. It wasn't him at all. The temperature up here was much warmer than in the bedrooms or the kitchen. Lance seemed to notice the temperature change as well. He stopped climbing, and placed his gloved hand on the wall, testing it. Unsatisfied, he brought his face in close until his nose almost touched the metal.

"It's warm," he said, his voice quiet with disbelief, "I can't believe it's this warm, this far away." Lance's skin paled from its previous flush, and he kept staring at the wall, tracing his fingers over it.

"That doesn't mean it's dangerous," said Hunk, "The castle was designed to run on Balmeran energy."

"No," said Lance, "But it means it's spreading."

His stomach sank. He wasn't ready for this, but he needed to be. Hunk steeled his nerves and placed his hand on Lance's shoulder, trying to pry his attention away from the wall, but Lance pushed him aside, choosing instead to jog up a few steps in front of him.

They stopped when they reached the first set of blast doors.

Heavily reinforced metal and polymer doors, vacuum-sealed shut to protect the upper half of the ship from attacks or air leak, loomed impenetrably before them. In all the times they'd fought the Galra, Hunk only remembered the doors being activated twice. When Sendak had taken over on Arus, and when they were under heavy fire in space.

"Seal up," said Lance, shutting his suit's visor and turning on life support. Hunk complied and did the same. A deep orange bar showing 14% power blinked in the corner of his vision.

Lance punched in the access code in the wall and led them up another set of stairs.

Hunk noticed that even up here, away from the main entrance hall, there were bits and pieces of broken sentries. Scraps of brightly coloured fabric dotted the floor from elaborate costumes the Galra had disguised their robots in before sending them into the castle to explode. A vision suddenly flashed in his mind, of vibrant colours and dazzling lights and, following that, a vivid memory of wine. A light, fruity number with an oaken aftertaste.

"Hey, Lance," Hunk slowed down his pace as his hands grasped at hazy ideas, "I think I remember a little bit."

"Of? You mean the attack?"

"There was, like a party, wasn't there? Some kind of meeting. And a whole bunch of aliens. There was going to be an alliance."

Hunk remembered the elegant purple stemless glass that was handed to him by a blue hand in a purple sleeve. He remembered savouring the delicate taste of the wine, rolling it back and forth on his tongue as voices speaking various languages he didn't recall chattered earnestly around him. And then the screams.

"Yeah, that was it all right," said Lance.

Hunk sighed as they walked past a scattering of turquoise beads and an abandoned silk scarf, frayed and burned at the edges.

"Lance," Hunk paused, as the jumbled noises echoed in his head, "There weren't any real people at the meeting, were there? Was it all just bots?"

Lance kept his gaze set in front of him. "Not that I've found. I think it was just us in the castle. Just bots."

Hunk breathed a sigh of relief. "I wonder how the other races got on after they found out they were being impersonated."

Lance perked up and stared over at Hunk.

"You know, I never actually thought about that."

Up a few more floors, they encountered more sets of sealed doors, each one opened by Lance punching in access codes, until they finally stopped, and Hunk saw it.

The glow.

Oozing out from under the bottom of the door was a liquid blue fluorescence that burned slightly when Hunk looked directly at it. His visor automatically tinted itself darker, and that helped, a little.

"Shit," Lance whispered.

They were still two sets of doors away from the main bridge at the uppermost tip of the castle.

"I'm not taking you through those doors, Hunk. It's leaking." Lance sounded like he was starting to panic again. "I thought the blast doors would keep it in."

Coran had told him about this on their way to the Balmera after Sendak shattered the first crystal, nearly killing Lance: A cracked crystal was a dangerous one. When whole and in alignment, the crystals were harmless, and their energies remained contained and stable for usage. But when damaged, if not disposed of properly, they leaked destructive radiation that would eventually contaminate an entire ship.

"I don't know how we've maintained power this long on a broken crystal," said Lance, more to himself than to Hunk. "I haven't really been inside the bridge since I patched the power to go to medical bay and checked the celestial map."

"What do you mean ' _really'_ been inside?'" asked Hunk.

"I didn't know about the leak until I got sick the first time." Lance's face was impossible to see behind his dark visor, but Hunk heard him shudder over the com. "I was fine when I went up there a few hours after the attack, but when I went back to check on things a few weeks later, the room was glowing blue and little crystals were starting to grow on the edges of things like sand."

"Oh, shit, how long did you spend up there?"

"Not long. When I realised I couldn't access the computers, I left. And then I was puking and covered in burns the next day. I crawled up here and shut the doors from the other end of the hall. It was still inside the final blast doors last time I checked a couple months ago. But it's… leaking now."

Lance kept staring at trickling ooze of bright blue seeping out from under the door.

"Fuck. Hunk, we're gonna die, aren't we."

"I honestly don't know."


	4. 7:59PM 23062065

"So, we're gonna die then?"

Lance was standing beside him in the darkened segment of corridor, between the two tightly sealed sets of blast doors, as the sickening blue glow slowly leaked into the chamber along the floor in front of them. His back was rigid and his arms dangled by his sides. As Lance's fingers twitched rhythmically against his legs, Hunk could hear the defeated flatness in his tone through the radioactive interference distorting their voices over the comm.

Although the life support in their suits modified internal temperatures to a safe and comfortable level, a flashing bar on the side of his vision told Hunk that it was well past oven-like this close to the bridge. Without protection, a human would be dead in minutes just from the heat, and not from the deadly crystalline decay.

"I didn't say that," Hunk replied, calmly but firmly, as heat waves rippled across his immediate vision, "I just haven-"

Lance cut him off before he could continue. "Have you seen enough?"

"I guess," Hunk shrugged. "I don't know what it's like on the bridge, but you said there were offshoot crystals growing?"

"That was almost a year ago. It's probably worse- It _could_ be worse. Maybe the bridge melted. I don't know. Look," Lance's voice was slowly rising in pitch and volume. "Have you seen enough, Hunk? This is boring and scary and I don't want to be here anymore."

Lance kept drumming his thighs lightly with his fingertips. Hunk couldn't see his expression through their black-tinted visors, but Lance made a noise through the radio that sounded like he was chewing his lip.

"I hear you." Hunk raised his hand to scratch at his nose, and then stopped, remembering he was wearing a helmet. And that the irritation was probably being caused by radiation exposure.

"Yeah," he sighed, "Fine. Let's shut the doors. We don't need to see any more."

But Lance remained, rigid and frozen as if hypnotized, staring at the blue leak escaping from under the door until Hunk reached out and touched him lightly on the shoulder. Lance jolted, suddenly aware of himself, and turned around, shuffling quickly away from the leak area and over to the outer doors. He came to his senses a few moments later and hit the sequence to open them, giving Hunk a few seconds on the timer to slide past him before they began to shut. The blast doors slowly closed together with a powerful hydraulic whirr and a final hiss of decompression on the other side.

Lance double-checked the locking mechanism after the doors stopped making any internal noise. And then a third time. Hunk would have previously thought it an unnecessary precaution, but after seeing the meltdown firsthand, he'd let Lance do what he needed to feel safe.

"What does 'I don't know' mean _,_ then?" asked Lance, finally, as his hand trailed down the wall from the keypad. He refused to look over his shoulder at Hunk.

Hunk shook his head, emptying his mind of the jumbled pre-planning stages of how to clean up the leak, seal the doors, decontaminate the bridge without being exposed to lethal doses of radiation, and eventually eject the crystal; barring the fact that they didn't have a replacement power source-

"It means I don't know, Lance." Hunk drew a long sigh, watching Lance's heel start to bounce against the floor as he jittered his anxiety away. "Look. This is a complicated mess. Balmeran radiation is toxic, yeah. And we're stuck out here, unbelievably far away from anything, and our ship is trashed and we're the only ones awake and it just… _is._ " Hunk waved his hands around in the air for emphasis, indicating the sealed doors behind them, "This is what it is."

Hunk clenched his jaw and sucked in his gut, half-expecting another round of emotional blowback from Lance, maybe another burst of tears. But Lance just nodded silently, stuck tapping his heel and shaking his knee and staring at the seal along the floor that held back the deadly blue ooze one set of doors further.

"We can cry about it," Hunk continued, "And you're _certainly_ welcome to," He paused, gauging Lance's reaction; more silence, "But we can also try to fix this shitbucket and get out of here. We'll figure it out, Lance. Or we'll die trying. So yeah, we might die out here. But I'm not gonna die laying down and giving up."

He turned to Lance, placing his hand on his shoulder again.

"…You sure didn't."

Moments of silence ticked by, and what Hunk thought was interference fuzz passed quietly through their radios until he realised it was coming and going in slow, rhythmic patterns. Lance was sniffling. Hunk wrapped his arm around his shoulder, allowing Lance to collapse into him.

He let Lance stay like that, and supported his weight until the stuttered gasping over the comm subsided and Lance straightened up, squared his shoulders and clapped Hunk on the back.

"So what do we do?" asked Lance as he finally tore his gaze away from the sealed doors over Hunk's shoulder.

Hunk tightened his grip around Lance. "We stay calm and we figure our shit out. I asked to see the crystal, and I've seen the crystal. Or... Well, the decomposing remnants of what it was a year ago," He said, suddenly letting go, "Anywho- I don't think we need to be up here any longer. Come on. Let's go decontaminate."

Hunk wondered if he'd phrased that correctly. How could he give Lance hope without being unreasonable? Did Lance want to hear a lie?

Lance nodded, adding, "The closest airlock near the main bridge is down two hallways."

"Huh," Hunk paused, "We'll be trailing radiation until we get there."

"Ok," said Lance. And then, "What if we, uh, _ran really fast?_ "

Hunk, for all he valued his friendship with Lance, tried his best to hold himself in. But the absurdity of the suggestion forced a loud snort out of him. Lance _had_ to be joking.

"What say we run away from our problems, Hunk?" Lance elbowed him in the side, and Hunk stopped trying to suppress his laughter, giving in to the sudden levity in Lance's voice.

"That's not gonna fix anything," He grinned, "But I'll race you there!"

Lance lowered himself into a mock runner's crouch.

"Ready, set: _radioactive!_ " Lance didn't even give Hunk a chance to prepare before he launched himself forward at breakneck speed.

" _Enough to make my systems blow!_ " Hunk yelled as Lance took off at a sprint ahead of him. After an initial lurch, Hunk barrelled forward, using his weight to build momentum into a straight charge down the hall.

"Welcome to the new age!" Lance called over his shoulder as Hunk picked up his pace, cutting the distance between them.

At the end of the hallway, Lance misjudged his speed and traction, skidding into the wall at the fork, and bouncing off of it with both hands as Hunk nearly barreled into him, taking the corner at the same time.

"Fuck!" Lance shrieked, and Hunk scrabbled at the smooth floor with his boots, lucky enough to find his footing and take the lead as Lance struggled to shift the direction of his momentum.

"Radioactive!" Hunk hollered as he heard Lance panting in his ear.

"Radioactive!" Lance sang back, as he caught up to Hunk.

The game paused when they hit the next set of blast doors and Lance entered the code in twice with clumsy fingers that were shaking with adrenaline, breathing hard and hopping in place impatiently as the doors slowly dragged themselves open.

A cartoonish battle of wills ensued as they both tried to squeeze past the barely-widening crack at the same time, but Lance, being the more lithe of the two, managed to worm his way ahead and took off again, long legs propelling him towards the end of the hall and the upper-level airlock chamber where they could rid themselves of radioactive contamination.

Although Lance was the first one to touch the airlock doors, it was Hunk that slammed his fist on the entrance button, arms outstretched, skidding to a hard stop in the layers of undisturbed dust as Lance scrambled out of the way to avoid getting crushed. A decided tie. Lance and Hunk stood there, as the doors sealed behind them, catching their breath and chuckling as Lance held his fist out to bump.

"Hey," he said as Hunk tapped him lightly with his own fist.

"Yeah?"

"I'm glad you're here, Hunk."

He turned to grin back at Lance, visible for the first time after their visors had untinted themselves from their smooth, glassy black protective state and adjusted to the gloomy dark of the rest of the castle.

"Y'know," said Hunk, with sarcastic cheer, "I'd say _'I'm glad I'm here, too'_ but honestly, our situation kinda sucks right now."

Lance let out a hearty belly-laugh as he walked over and reached into a storage panel on the side wall of the tiny decontamination room, pulling out a clear plastic square bucket. He set it against the wall and pushed another panel aside, revealing a faucet head. Lance reached down and pressed a button to get the tap running. The faucet coughed and spat out a few pressurized air bubbles, and then water began flowing out; a weak, gurgling stream, but enough to fill the square pail as Lance stood over it, casually leaning against the wall.

"Why's there just a bucket?" Hunk asked as Lance sloshed the pail down next to him, along with two plastic scrub brushes and a bottle of strong decontaminant detergent. "What happened to the wash feature we had when we were covered in those spores?"

"I told you," Lance sighed as he uncapped the bottle and squirted a bunch of detergent into the water, "the only shower that works, _literally,_ is the one off of Coran's bedroom. And also," he grabbed a brush and dunked it in, working up a thick lather with his hands, "There isn't a lot of water left to work with."

"Oh, god," Hunk gasped, "Do we have a leak? Are we low on vital materials? How's our air circulation?"

Lance waved his hand dismissively, not even bothering to look up at Hunk's wide-eyed panic. "The air's exactly like you saw earlier. It's there, it's just not circulating well. And… Not exactly." Lance sat down and began scrubbing the bottoms of his boots and working his way up, nudging Hunk in the shin to do the same, "The water's _on_ the ship, it's just not where it's supposed to be. I can show you that, too, if you want."

"Oh, yeah?" Hunk picked up his own brush against his better judgement, lathering it, and started to wash his arm bracers.

"It's… in the hanger. Frozen."

Hunk was jolted by a sudden new awareness.

"How are the lions?"

Lance shrugged, keeping his focus on dunking his brush back in the soapy water and continuously scrubbing his suit. Hunk couldn't tell if he was disinterested in the conversation or just really intent on getting clean. "Same as always, I guess. Hard to say. I haven't visited there very often. I can kinda hear Blue through the door sometimes, but... "

Lance trailed away, and Hunk waited for him to finish his sentence. He'd stopped scrubbing himself, and his shoulders sank as the brush drooped in his hands.

"It's why I made the circle."

Hunk stared at him.

"What circ- Oh, you mean the creepy shrine in Shiro's bedroom?"

"It's not creepy!" Lance whipped around and flicked a wad of lather at Hunk, white splatter hitting him in the centre of his visor. "It's sacred!"

Hunk wiped the suds away and continued to scrub at his chestpiece. "Sorry."

"Better be," Lance huffed, dipping his brush. And then, a little more childishly, "I spent a lot of time making it."

Hunk shoved away the notion that he now had no idea what Lance's measurement of 'a lot of time' meant. Lance squirted more soap into the bucket.

"Get my back?" Lance stood and offered his brush to Hunk, but Hunk held up his own and Lance twirled his between his fingers, turning to face away from him. "I chose that spot on the floor in Shiro's room because it's where I can most clearly hear her voice."

"Blue?" Hunk asked as he scrubbed the various holes and crevices in Lance's jet pack.

"No," Lance shook his head, "The Black Lion. I can hear her all the way through the ship if I sit right there. Don't ask me how, 'cause I don't know. I used to lay there for hours, just trying to hear another voice..."

Lance went quiet, and soon the only sound was the bristles of Hunk's brush grazing over and over Lance's suit. Lance started jittering his leg again, heel splashing tiny wet noises in the soapy puddle beneath them. "You go crazy when it's too silent for too long, Hunk."

Hunk nodded as Lance turned and grabbed the brush out of his hands, motioning for Hunk to kneel down so he could return the favour.

"What does she say?" Hunk asked as Lance dipped the brush into the bucket, swirling it around. He splashed an unnecessary amount of sudsy water on Hunk and started scrubbing vigorously.

"Well, she mostly keeps telling me that everything's gonna be alright."

Lance was practically pushing him over now, as he scrubbed harder and harder, and Hunk was feeling pretty battered by the force of his effort. "That's good, yeah?" He grunted as he leaned back against Lance's hands. Lance got the idea and softened his touch.

"And that patience yields focus." Lance sighed, "Whatever that means." Lance threw his brush down in the bucket, creating a larger splash than he'd intended. "Sometimes I'd get tired and fall asleep there, but I'd always have weird nightmares. I try not to do that anymore."

"Yeesh," Hunk shuddered, "Did you get cold?" He couldn't imagine sleeping on the cold, hard metal floor when the castle did its grinding pipe thing, where the air stopped circulating and the temperature dipped. Not unless Lance was sleeping in his space suit. Still uncomfortable, though. The suits weren't designed to be lived in.

"I think I'm just used to it now."

The lights overhead flickered a bit, buzzing and dimming erratically. Hunk stared up at the sealed circles of light overhead with mild concern while Lance dunked the brush in the bucket once more. He made like he was about to start washing Hunk again, but Hunk gently placed his hand over Lance's, lowering it.

"What about Blue?" he asked, catching a glimpse of Lance's eyes. There was that sadness again, like when he was back in the main entrance hall, mourning the lack of stars; and Hunk now understood a little more where that deep melancholy stemmed from. Though he'd never understand the depth of it.

"She's hard to hear since the hangar's cut off, but I sometimes get through. It's a little, um, difficult to speak with them." Lance's flat, deadened tone sounded uncharacteristically bitter, especially with how much he always praised his beloved ship.

Hunk grabbed his brush out of the bucket and picked it up, carrying it over to the drain in the centre of the room.

"How so?" he asked as he tipped it over, watching the invisible toxic contamination disappear down through the pipes into the castle's waste filtration system.

Lance kicked at the watery suds on the floor, throwing up a wet spray that spattered the nearby wall. "They're so used to waiting for 10,000 years, Hunk. They don't… They don't _really_ understand what's wrong." He watched as the water droplets slowly dribbled in crooked lines down towards the floor. "They're a little, uh, _casual_ about it," He shrugged, "Sometimes it hurts."

"Huh," Hunk hummed as he set the bucket down against the side panel and pressed the button to refill it, "Does Blue not care at all?"

"I mean, I _think_ she does," said Lance, though his tone betrayed a lack of confidence, "But it's like she doesn't understand human lifespans. Or, like, what an hour or day or year _means._ She's a machine, Hunk. She'll never grow old or die."

"Do you-" Hunk dropped the bucket in front of Lance as the overflowing water sloshed over the side, hitting Lance's boot. "Nevermind," he said, shaking his head, pushing the idea out of his mind.

"What?"

"Nothing, don't worry about it." Hunk tried to play it off, but Lance picked up the bucket and tossed its contents at him when he wasn't looking, dousing him in a loud echoing splash that rang throughout the tiny metal room.

"No, tell me." He laughed at Hunk's sopping figure, while still holding the bucket.

Hunk wiped at his visor. "Fine. Do you think machines becoming outdated is like them growing old?"

Lance put the bucket down. "Eh, maybe. What does that have to do with Blue?"

"Dude, I told you it wasn't relevant. I mean," Hunk picked the bucket up, and brought it back over to the wall to refill it, "I mean, take the castle. It's over 10,000 years old, and now we've seen the latest Galra ships flying around. And after another whole year, who knows what advancements they've made. We're outclassed in more ways than one as our ship keeps breaking down." He shrugged and hauled the bucket back over, lifting it up and smacking Lance with a wall of cold water, "It's old."

"Yeah, I know, I _hear_ you," Lance groaned, as he took a step back to rebalance himself from the force of the water crashing over him, "But that doesn't… ugh, _Hunk._ Why are you defending them?" He whipped a few stray drips from his arms back at Hunk.

"I'm not!" Hunk threw his hands up in defense, "I'm just saying, maybe in a more metaphorical way, machines _do_ know what it means to get old."

Lance glared at him, and Hunk cowered behind the bucket.

"I don't hate them," Lance sighed, finally, taking his helmet off and running his wet hand through his hair, "I don't. It's just hard when the only half-living things around to talk to don't understand what's going on." He bent down and picked up the brushes, moving closer to Hunk who was still by the faucet.

"Sorry," said Hunk as he back out of the way, "I'm not helping."

"Yeah. No." Lance turned the water back on and gave the brushes a final rinse and flick before storing them back in the side panel. Hunk went and grabbed the detergent.

"I guess we're just like…" He paused, crouching underneath Lance to place the soap by the brushes, "Ants to them. Or dolls, or something. Leaf in the wind."

Lance slammed the panel shut, nearly clipping Hunk's fingers in the process. "I don't want to think about it."


	5. 8:42PM 23062065

"Thank god my hair grew back," yawned Lance as he stretched his arms up behind his neck, running his fingers through his short brown shag and cracking his knuckles overhead in the process. He scooped his helmet off the floor and slid it back on as Hunk stood up from the vent grate he was leaning against, eager to press onward so they could reach the hangar before it got too late.

As they'd descended back down the stairs, Hunk took note of the cooling temperature around him. He'd canceled his internal life support to save his suit's dwindling power supply, and popped off his helmet to get a breath of questionably fresh air. It was warm and balmy for the first few floors after they left the decontamination room, but was slowly becoming colder and colder with every set of stairs.

"It fell out?" asked Hunk, following behind Lance's intuitive steering down the narrow, slowly curving passageway that ran along, he figured, the outer hull of the ship. He shivered slightly as a cold draft tickled the delicate hairs on his neck. Hunk wasn't overly familiar with the back-ends and lesser-used halls of the castle, but Lance seemed to be able to navigate them wholly in the dark.

And dark it was.

Lance was taking him through one of the smaller side corridors, the ones where any power above minimal life support had been deemed unnecessary by the castle's internal settings, and the air hung about them like a thick curtain; cold and heavy and stale. The ground was covered in the thickest layer of dust Hunk had encountered yet; it puffed up in clumpy tufts around them and stuck to their newly cleaned suits as the two made their way through the nearly pitch-black hall.

Hunk's heart leapt in his chest as something dark and unknowable crunched under his boot. He'd said it was a faster way to get to the hangar, and Hunk had trusted Lance on this one. Lance, however, didn't mention the terrifying experience of stepping over the numerous disintegrating remains of exploded galra sentries he'd piled in there to avoid having to look at them during his time alone.

"Yep," Lance shrugged, visible only by the glowing portions of his suit's shoulders, "A few days after I went up to the bridge for the second time and I got all those burns, it started falling out in these freaky chunks. I had _nothing,_ Hunk. No eyebrows, no pubes. I looked like a naked mole rat," he chuckled, "For two months."

Lance wasn't even looking down at the trails of dusty footprints in Hunk's wristlight beam to tell him where he was going. His eyes were up, along the high, narrow walls, following the weak and distant pools of blue light overhead to the next one, and the next one, steering Hunk around sharp corners and leading him like a rodent in the walls of an old house down more sets of curving stairs. Or maybe he just didn't want to look down at the piles of wreckage they were currently wading through.

"Oh," said Hunk, suddenly.

"What?" Lance stopped, turning to look up at him from a few steps below.

"No, keep going," Hunk countered as he motioned Lance forward, trying not to reveal how badly he wanted to be out of this claustrophobic space. "But, where are the mice?"

Lance dolefully skipped ahead, letting his arms swing at his sides and his body flop forward, allowing gravity to propel him down each and every step.

"I found them on the bridge a few hours after everything was over. I think they got hit during the battle, or maybe with some of the radiation. I put them in with Allura. If you look closely, they're behind her left leg. I thought, y'know, maybe they'd like it in there..."

Lance's voice trailed away as they reached the bottom of the stairs and Hunk thought back to earlier that day in medical bay, and the sight his friends with their eyes gently closed, floating motionless in the pods. Briefly distracted by the memory of Pidge's moustache drawn on the clear screen in front of her, Hunk tried to recall if he'd actually seen the mice with Allura or not. Truth be told, he couldn't remember.

He felt his breath instinctively hitch in his throat for a third time as a trace of fingers or claws ghosted across one of his hands. Hunk had to keep reminding himself that they were walking past the broken and totally immobilized remains of year-old robots lying on the floor. They were dead and broken. They couldn't move. They were broken.

The stale air wasn't helping. His chest ached and he just couldn't take a full breath. As vague memories of shooting his hand cannon into a crowd of brightly coloured silk and fleeing bodies flashed in his mind, the hallway seemed to bend and twist before his very eyes. Hunk found himself slowly growing weak and nauseous with every staggering step. He swore to himself that the room was getting smaller.

"I need a moment," Hunk groaned as he felt a dry heave welling within him. Despite the cold, dry air enveloping them, sweat was beading on his forehead and he swayed on the spot, reaching desperately out for the wall to steady himself.

"Whoa. Hey. Take it easy, ok?" Lance was suddenly by his side, arm around his shoulders and left hand delicately wiping his brow as concern lined his dimly lit face. "We're not in any rush."

Hunk wanted to mention that _he_ was; to get out of there, but he shoved the comment back down, along with the remains of his last meal, and threw his hand out to steady himself on the corridor wall. His palm connected with cold, solid, logical metal, and his body reaffirmed to his flailing brain that he was still standing upright.

But something felt wrong. Just a little bit.

Hunk steadied his nerves as he counted to ten, deepening his breaths as his hands remained firmly planted on the wall. His nausea wasn't the problem. It'd pass, he knew. Just a bit of vertigo, and bout of anxiety after a long day. Having Lance by his side would help.

No. The wrongness in his gut, as Hunk could tell, was because the wall wasn't flat. This hallway, it should've been vertical. But those curves he saw earlier; it wasn't his vision swimming. Hunk smoothed his hands up and along the wall, testing his theory as Lance hovered beside him and his dizziness receded. The thick metal paneling rippled under his fingertips.

The wall of the ship was… _bent._

"Hunk? Are you ok?" Lance was shaking him gently by the shoulder as Hunk staggered a few steps forward down the corridor, dragging his hands along the large, sloping convex curve that was slowly revealing itself to his touch. "Is it the radiation, man? Did you get burned back there? Hunk? Hunk, talk to me."

"No, just-" He tried to form a coherent answer, but the effort of talking or thinking was too much to keep up with Lance's peppering questions. It wasn't the radiation. Not that he could tell. It was the _wrongness_ of the wall. Of the whole hallway. Hunk tried waving his hand over his shoulder in Lance's face, as he stared in the other direction at the unmistakable inward slant running down one half of the narrow passage, but Lance wasn't really getting the message, and at this point, Hunk wasn't entirely sure what the message was.

"Come on," said Lance, pulling Hunk by the wrist, "This place isn't doing you any good. Let's get you back into fresher air."

He felt Lance grab his arm and wrap it around his neck, supporting Hunk from below just as the second wave of vertigo hit, and he almost collapsed onto Lance's straining legs. Hunk felt a brief wash of guilt that his skinny friend had voluntarily taken on the physical responsibility of his weight, and he tried to pull away and walk by himself, but Lance was insistent. He quietly clung to Hunk with his body, placing one foot in front of the other, determined to help Hunk get out of the suffocating tunnel.

"When we fix up the ship a bit more," Hunk mumbled as Lance shifted his bony shoulders underneath him, "I'm gonna feed you."

"To the sharks?"

Hunk chuckled.

"Nah, I'd like that," said Lance, smiling, as he reaffirmed his grip on Hunk's waist.

Faint echoes of tinnitus rang in his ears while flashes of white-hot lights tugged at Hunk's memory. The explosion that caused this kind of damage on the other side of the wall must have been phenomenal. It must have taken a chain reaction that had obliterated an entire hallway full of drones, all packed with explosives. But, somehow, that wasn't it. As his senses slowly returned, and he was able to look back at the curving bubble in the thick inches of space-age metal more rationally, Hunk swore that something else was wrong. That wasn't it.

They reached the end of the tight corridor in silence, and soon enough, they were back in one of the greater halls. Hunk found himself suddenly grateful for the soft glow of lights along the ceiling that were frequent enough to illuminate the whole space; bright enough to cast a shadow behind them, even as they flickered ominously overhead. Hunk never thought he'd be glad to see his own shadow before.

A cool draft wafted down the wider thoroughfare, fanning his face, and Hunk breathed in deeply. The filters were still running and hadn't shut off in a while, circulating fresh air to the more vital areas of the castle. He shifted his weight away from Lance and gave him a quick squeeze of gratitude, and continued to carry forward on his own two feet.

"What else did you do?" he asked, as his voice echoed down the long, empty hall.

"Huh?"

"I mean," said Hunk, shifting his helmet under his other arm, "Besides learning to dance and dredging up all your happiness and memories and all that. How'd you get by?"

"Well," Lance pursed his lips thoughtfully, "I beat Killbot Phantasm I on that Mercury Gameflux Pidge found at the mall. And then I beat it on hard mode. And then I beat it on extreme mode and found all the easter eggs..."

"Huh," Hunk raised an eyebrow, "How long did that take you?"

"About two weeks without breaks." Lance kicked a loose bolt down the hallway, and they heard it bouncing and clanking as it skipped along the metallic floor.

"So, adding up all the time you were-"

"No, I mean I played that game non-stop for two weeks." Lance turned to stare at him with mock seriousness in his eyes, "What, you think I had an adult there to tell me to eat or go to bed?"

"Um," Hunk swallowed a gulp of air, giving himself hiccups.

"I'm just kidding," Lance laughed, "It was while I was recovering from the radiation poisoning. I had a hard time moving around with all the burns. My skin was all gross and scabby, so I was stuck in medical bay all that time, rubbing cream all over my body. So I just kept myself busy until I could get up and move around more."

"Dude-," Hunk hiccuped, "That sounds like- hell."

"Yep. It was." He didn't elaborate more, and Hunk found himself staring at the rows of footprints running up and down the hallway in the dust.

"But, ok. One positive thing I did learn?" Lance suddenly piped up, sticking his index finger triumphantly in the air.

Hunk couldn't imagine anything positive coming out of radiation poisoning, but he took Lance at his word.

"I look pretty damn ok when bald. I gotta say." As he flashed Hunk his signature cheesy grin, Lance smoothed his hands over his helmet and stuck a cocky pose, "I'm like a sexy Charles Xavier... Or Mr. Clean!"

Hunk's echoing laughter bounced down the hallway and back, infecting Lance with giggles, even as he tried his best to stay sexy and aloof. Lance's cocky smirk puckered and twitched, and his pose fell apart as Hunk slapped him on the back, laughing, until his head felt dizzy and light. But in a good way.

"Or Captain Picard?" Hunk was now trying to picture Lance completely hairless. All he could really imagine was Lance as some kind of giant baby and it made him laugh even harder.

"Ooh, yeah!" gasped Lance, stroking his chin, "Or Vin Diesel!"

"Or, y'know, a sexy Lex Luthor," Hunk offered, rather enjoying the game of trivia, "Or, mayhaps Lord Voldemort if you're feeling villainous?"

Lance shook his head. "I dunno, man," he said, squinting and pursing his lips, "Voldemort wasn't really _sexy._ He didn't have a nose."

"Yeah, but he had swagger! He _owned_ that bald head."

"This is true," Lance mused.

They turned off of the main hallway and headed down the wide stairwell towards the lion hangar.

"Y'know, that's really a plus, dude," said Hunk, while also desperately wishing that any of the elevators still worked. He wasn't out of shape by any means, but two trips up and down the entire castle were really starting to burn. "When you get older man, that's just one less thing to worry about. _'Do I look good bald?'_ "

"Yeah, I just need to see if I can still have kids after this," Lance hummed, still clicking his lips.

"No, you've got it, man. Chicks will be all over you." Hunk thumped Lance on the back, nearly pushing him down the remainder of the flight of stairs.

"Whoa, shi-" Lance caught himself a few steps below, and looked back up at Hunk, annoyed, "Got that bald swag, yeah. But still. Y'know..."

"Huh?"

"I mean, ok." He waited for Hunk to get on his level at the landing before the next set of steps, "I've been thinking about it ever since I got burned almost a year ago, now."

"Still feels weird to have you say that," said Hunk.

"Dude it feels weird to have _me_ say it. But anyway."

"Yeah," Hunk scratched his chin and shoved his helmet back on his head, "Wait, what do you mean _'still'_ have kids?"

"That's what I mean!" gasped Lance, exasperated, "Do you think I can still have kids, or did I microwave my nuts?"

Lance was looking at him with a desperate need for reaffirmation in his eyes, and Hunk, ever the realist, opened his mouth before he really thought about what he was saying.

"...Dude, I don't know, I wasn't there."

Lance sighed, and kept awkwardly eyeing his crotch every so often as he walked.

Down the stairs they went, and the air was getting colder and colder with every floor. By the fourth switchback of stairs, Hunk could see his breath escaping in white puffs in front of him. If he hadn't been traveling all over the ship and working up a decent sweat, he'd be very tempted to turn on his suit's life support.

"I don't hear any banging," he said, scanning the frost-rimmed corners of the ceiling overhead, "Is it doing the pipes thing again?"

"Nope," said Lance, failing to disguise the slight shiver in his voice, "Always cold down here. It's pretty much been like this all year. Hot at the top of the ship, cold at the bottom. That's not the worst of it."

As he turned the corner, Hunk saw Lance stop before he saw why. There should have been a few more stairs left to go, and then the high-arched doorway leading to the lion hangar. Instead, about halfway down, there was a thick sheet of solid ice.

"Like I said, the whole hangar's flooded." Lance was looking at him reproachfully now, as if apologising for something he hadn't done, "I have no idea where the water came from." He skipped down the last few steps and carefully transferred his weight onto the slick ice, heading towards where the very top of the doorway frame met the sloping ceiling and their path suddenly, disappointingly, ended.

"This is why I didn't have much contact with Blue," he sighed, running his hand along the ceiling as he knelt down to wedge himself into the awkward space, "I can't reach the hangar. I mean, I can hear bits and pieces if I cram myself in real close, but it's kinda pointless," he shuddered, "And cold."

And then, suddenly, before Hunk could respond, Lance pressed his face into the ice by the doorframe and shouted, "Yeah! I'm back! Hunk's awake!"

He paused for a moment, ear pressed to the ice in deep concentration, and then relaxed, scooping himself up and scooting away from the dead-end wedge of ceiling.

"Same as always," he grumbled, curling his knees up to his chest as his white breath hung in the air, "I could be gone for a day or for five months. She doesn't understand our time."

Lance buried his face into his knees as Hunk slid down beside him and wrapped an arm around his shoulder, pulling him close. At the very least, he could return the favour from upstairs.

"Hey."

Lance made an indistinct noise of recognition.

"What about the Rock? He's a sexy dude, and he's bald sometimes."

Lance shrugged and leaned his head closer into Hunk's chest, and Hunk could feel his hot breath against his cheek in the biting cold. "Yeah, but I feel like he's more in your territory."

"What, because he's an Islander?"

Lance's eyes shifted from side to side. "And he's… y'know…"

"Dark?"

"Big," he mumbled.

Hunk chuckled. They'd come so far, and yet they were trapped by a few feet of cie from the the only other sentient being on the ship. Seemed like a waste. Surely there had to be another-

"What about the zip-lines?" he asked before he could even finish his own thought.

"What about- oh." Lance jerked under his arm, sitting bolt upright, "Oh! Like, maybe we can slide down and drop in!"

"Yeah!"

"Hunk, you're either crazy or a genius!"

"Let's go find out!"

Back up the stairs they ran, against the wishes of Hunk's calves, up to the main floor of the castle, where they hit warm air like a wall of bricks.

"You want to tell me that in an entire year, you never thought of trying the zip-lines?"

"I mean, it occurred to me early on, but I was afraid of getting stuck. None of the elevators work, why would they? So… I kinda shelved that idea."

"And then you forgot."

"And then I forgot."


	6. 8:59PM 23062065

"How can you stand all the darkness?"

Hunk swore as he tripped for the third frustrating time on another stair in the dingy lowlight of the castle halls. Pain shot up his wrists as his palms slapped the hard metal corner coming up fast in front of him, polymer-protected knees scuffing against the floor, and his thighs ached as he hauled himself to his feet once more. The steps were covered in uneven patches of slick black ice, and the spiky cleats deployed from his boots were making each step a precarious game of traction versus balance.

"Eh," Lance hummed from somewhere behind him, "You get used to it. Took me a couple days after the lights really shut off. I think I have bat vision by now. Or maybe I just move around by smell."

Hunk smirked at the idea of Lance down on all fours, nose to the ground like a bloodhound, sniffing out his way to the bathroom in the middle of their permanent night. Lance slapped him on the back as he passed Hunk on the stairs.

"Dude," Lance sighed, "I haven't seen sunlight in over a year. I swear I'm getting paler. Like one of those cave-lizard things that have no eyeballs." Hunk could see him making little clawing motions with his fingers out of the corner of his eye.

"Whoa, whoa, really?"

Lance turned to face him down from the steps above, his body a terrifying silhouette in the pale blue emergency lighting of the lower levels. "Hunk, I'm… I'm turning _white._ "

"Quick!" Hunk gasped as he clutched his heart, bracing himself against the wall, "How do you feel about unseasoned food?"

"I mean," Lance shrugged, "Realistically speaking, at this point, anything sounds better than food go-OH MY GOD, HUNK I'M TURNING WHITE."

"NO! NO! NO! NO!"

Hunk lunged forward and grabbed Lance by his skinny wrists.

"THIS CAN'T BE HAPPENING!" Lance wailed.

Hunk nodded soberly. "Lance, your children are going to be named Mikaeyla and Laykynn."

"No!" Lance moaned, "I'm gonna give a shit about organic food and PTA meetings!" and he draped his arm dramatically over his forehead as Hunk's lungs started turn burn from laughter and exhaustion in the frigid air.

Halfway up the stairs to the main level, Hunk finally slowed down from their ill-advised rush. His whole body was hot and heavy from exertion and his legs felt like jello and he'd noticed that the frost lining the ceiling had turned into an ominous drip. He told himself he was too busy, now, to focus on whatever busted pipe had caused all the water on board to leak into the bottom of the ship, and certainly too tired. A cold splash landed on his bottom lip, leaking uninvited into his mouth. It tasted like rust.

"Oh, speaking of turning white-" Lance suddenly interjected, "That guy from Mad Max. Now _he_ was a sexy bald dude."

Lance's ADHD had a magical way of countering Hunk's anxious perseveration.

"You mean Max? He's basically in the titl-"

"No," Lance shook his head, "The evil kid! Y'know, 'Witness me!'"

"Oh, Warboy."

"Yeah, him! Nux!" Lance snapped his fingers, and the sound rang up and down the stairs, countered by two heavy sets of breath.

"Wasn't Max bald, too, at some point?" Hunk tried to think back to a movie that was already years old and filed away in the back of his mind, marveling at the fact that Lance could remember a name and a face after a year in total isolation. Mostly he just envisioned exploding vehicles and a flamethrowing guitar.

Lance wiped a smiley face into the condensation on the wall as he walked. "Uh, maybe. I don't recall. But, like, let's be real, Hunk. I may be bald-sexy, but I'm not Tom Hardy-sexy."

"Gotta work up to that, huh?"

"Yeah." Lance rubbed at his chin, pondering, "Get some scruff going. No, actually, I don't think he ever was. I think he just had short hair."

Hunk honestly couldn't remember.

"Great," Lance grumbled after ten more steps in complete silence, "Now we have no way of knowing."

"Yeah. No Google at the end of the universe."

"...Fuck."

Four more sets of stairs later they reached the main level, where the lower access tubes to the zip lines hid behind secret panel-doors only the paladins could open with their suits. Hunk told himself that his labored breathing and gross layer of sweat was simply from wearing his suit without life support. He refused to admit that his body was so tired. But his hands were vibrating and his heart pounded in his chest. He may have lost a couple pounds after a year in stasis, but the pod had certainly done a number on his stamina. Not the trade-off he was looking for. At least Lance didn't seem to notice.

The yellow and blue zip line entrances stood across from each other in the main hall, and yet Lance was still hovering around Hunk, as the yellow panel slid away into the wall, staring down into the dark descent looming before them.

"All yours, buddy."

Hunk looked over his shoulder at Lance. His face wasn't kidding.

"Look, you grab on, and I'll grab you. We'll go down together."

"That's… exactly what I'm worried about," said Hunk, straining to see more than five feet into the depths of the tube. He could really use that bat vision Lance was talking about earlier.

"This was your idea, remember?"

"... yeah."

And it was. Hunk wanted to see the lions. He needed to see Yellow again, and ask them questions that he couldn't just yell through a blocked-off doorway. What happened to them? What happened to the ship? Why the circle in Shiro's bedroom? What happened to _Lance?_

This was a bad idea. It was definitely a bad idea. Hunk felt it in every fibre of his being. He should just go upstairs, take off his suit, charge his battery pack, and go to sleep. That's what he should do. He should make a snack, get under some blankets, and prepare for when the heat would shut off again. That was, for all intents and purposes, what Hunk should do.

But he wanted to see the hangar.

"Grab on tight."

Hunk grabbed the handles of the zip-line and a strained grunt involuntarily escaped his throat as Lance wrapped his arms around his neck and kicked off the back wall before gripping Hunk's waist with his legs.

The two shot forward with all the speed and force artificial gravity could give them, screaming into the pitch-darkness of the unlit tube as they descended floor after floor after floor towards the bottom of the ship.

"I can't see where we're going!" Lance shouted, directly in Hunk's ear.

"We must be cl-" Whump.

Hunk's feet suddenly connected with rock-hard ground and the force of Lance behind him flung his exhausted fingers from the handle bars. He tumbled forward belly-first, and when his chin connected painfully with cold ice, the two boys skidded forward in a tangled heap until their combined momentum wedged them into the far corner of the sloping tube.

"Well, shit."

"We're stuck."

After a moment gathering his senses and making sure nothing was broken, Hunk carved himself out from between Lance and the low angled ceiling, and reached to activate his wrist light. The battery display in his helmet bleeped an angry red. 6% power remaining.

"We're a long way down," he said as he stood and shone his light back up the tube, "Any way we can climb back up?"

Lance launched to his feet and scrabbled at the steep climb, fighting for traction with his space boots as he reached and grabbed for any sort of hold with his long spider-arms. But no matter how much he kicked and clawed at the smooth metal walls of the shaft, he always came squeaking and sliding back down to the flood of ice.

All that for nothing. He should have realised it before. It was stupid not to gauge the height of the water levels before he'd left the other stairs. This was exactly what Lance had mentioned when he said he didn't try the zip lines a year ago. And at least _his_ instincts had served him. Now they were stuck, and it was all his own stupid idea. He watched Lance once again get about ten feet up the tube until he lost his momentum and slid back down, crumpling and swearing at Hunk's feet.

He could feel the panic start to rise, that surge of adrenaline making his thoughts fly quick and catastrophic through his mind. He didn't want to think about Lance and him dying, cold and alone in a forgotten transport tunnel while everyone else was asleep in the pods. The images made his stomach churn.

He shut his flashlight off to save power.

"We have to be close," he said, crouching down towards the angled wedge of ceiling and palming his way along the floor, more giving himself something to do than actually being useful, "I can feel Yellow in the hangar nearby."

"No shit, dude," Lance panted, "We're at the bottom of the zipline. That's why we came down here."

"Fuck off."

"But look!"

In the bottom corner of the tunnel, as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Hunk could see what Lance was referring to. There was a subtle luminescence seeping under the sunken ceiling; a faint light visible below them through several feet of translucent ice.

"We're actually nearly there!"

"Nearly, but not entirely," grumbled Hunk, even as his heart leapt in his throat.

"Nah, dude," and Lance sounded astoundingly jovial for someone trapped in the icy dark, "We just gotta bust out the heavy machinery. Can you aim your mini at the ice?"

"Dude, I have 6% power. That's gonna take everything I have left." Cold and alone, his mind sang. Shivering and cold and alone. No light, no food, no power.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Lance snapped back, "Do you have a better idea than dying in a hole?"

He was right. Hunk activated his bayard and felt the heavy gun materialize into existence in his hands, just as the action itself sucked a whole percentage from his dwindling battery pack. Hunk swallowed. This was it. May as well make it worth it.

"Hey Lance..."

"Yeah?"

His eyes flickered mischievously as Hunk hefted the powerful cannon. "Can I do a Scarface?"

"Hunk," Lance said as he placed his hand on Hunk's shoulder with a genuine endearment, "This is _absolutely_ an appropriate time to do a Scarface."

Hunk raised his bayard and Lance, standing beside him, sealed the visor on his helm and activated his own assault rifle. Hunk took aim at the floor in front of them as Lance followed suit, and, after a brief nod, they shouted " _Say hello to my little friend!_ "

The noise was deafening as their combined gunfire let loose a stream of brilliant white flashes and Hunk's weapon tore up the ice around them as Lance pelted the fracturing layers with backup fire. The explosive noise echoed up through the tube as layers of solid ice shattered and stray droplets of water vaporized.

Eventually, after a few pauses in the plasma barrage to scrape away the piles of ice shards, and a couple respites to catch their breath, there was a small hole that dipped under the sloping edge of the zipline tube and broke into the hangar beyond. It was just as well, because as Lance dredged a pile of half-melted ice slush out of the belly of the tunnel, Hunk's power pack bleeped its last final protest and shut off, dematerializing his bayard and throwing them into the darkness once more.

The hole was small, and certainly not pretty. Digging down was easy enough, but there was a sharp squeeze and a steep bottleneck where they had to start moving upward once again, and Hunk dearly wished he had even five more minutes of power to cut a few more chunks from the ice.

"If I get down and crawl, I think I can make it," said Lance, already on his knees and elbows, squirming in, helmet flashlight flicking around in the tunnel.

"See anything?" Hunk asked as Lance's ass reappeared. And then his head.

"I think I can make it, yeah." He stared up and down at Hunk, suddenly apprehensive, "I don't know, if you want to, maybe you could-"

"What?"

"Y'know…" Lance was already turning back around to slide into the tiny hole.

"What, Lance? Squeeze my chub?"

"Well, 'cause you- _you know_ … We could try to make the hole bigger if-"

Hunk sighed, knowing where Lance was obviously going with this one. After 19 years in his body, he dearly wished people would just get to the point.

"I'm fat, Lance. You can say it."

Lance made a weird coughing noise. Hunk made a mental note to bring it up later.

"Hunk," Lance was looking at him now with a weirdly uncomfortable mixture of pity and blame, "Last time you-"

"What?" he snapped, cutting Lance off, annoyed that this was even a conversation they were having. Why did Lance look like he was about to cry?

"You didn't fit, dude, ok?" Lance's voice was cracked and raw. "We got separated because you didn't fit. And you got stuck. I don't want that to happen again."

"I don't remember-"

"Nevermind," Lance sighed, "You were asleep the whole time. Just like- Fuck it, nevermind. Does it look like you can fit?"

"I'll be fine," said Hunk. Maybe a little more bitterly than he intended.

Lance was down on his elbows and knees without another word. He started wriggling his way back into the tunnel with only the briefest backward glance of his helmet light shining in Hunk's eyes, skinny eel-body having no trouble slinking past the narrow bottleneck they'd carved out of the midsection where the tunnel started to slope upwards again.

"Don't wait for me," said Hunk when he heard Lance emerge on the other side.

What he should have said was, "Please don't listen to me squeal like a pig as I haul my tired, sweaty ass through this tiny hole." Hunk immediately felt the tight squeeze as he began shoving his way in, jagged ice edges poking into him from all sides, a constant physical reminder of " _yeah, you're fat_ " as he threw his weight into pushing himself forward.

And then it happened. He could blame it on not having enough grip with his arms, or his feet hitting a slippery patch and kicking at nothing but slick ice, but it happened. He got stuck. Right at the bottleneck where Lance gracefully squirmed his body into a delicate curve, sidling through the tunnel and up the sharp angle like a goddamned leopard seal. And here he was, stuck half-twisted on his side while his arms flailed for something to grab onto and Lance was staring down at him like he was worried Hunk was going to live the rest of his life half-jammed in a hole.

"Stop looking at me like that."

"Just let me know what-"

"I said _fuck off,_ Lance." He jammed his elbow down by his gut and squeezed, exhaling his breath and wrenching his body back and forth in an undignified flopping motion.

"I can help pull, if you-" Hunk glared up at him, ready to bite Lance's fingertips off as they reached out for him. He bit down, gathered his strength and wiggled a bit more. Slowly, achingly, he felt a bit of movement. His heel found a tiny lump of ice to push off against, and Hunk shoved, panting and wriggling as he hauled himself through that damn hole.

He clawed his way to the other side unceremoniously, his jet pack scraping dangerously on a last inconvenient wedge of ice as he emerged into the enormous hangar and Lance's expression of embarrassed relief.

Aside from being about eight feet closer to the enormous vaulted ceiling, the hangar was exactly as Hunk remembered it. The Black Lion loomed, large and imposing, in an alcove straight across from him as great swatches of thick ice swallowed up the bottom of her legs and paws. The Green Lion stood, silently watching him on his right, head bent at an awkward angle to get a better look at the two paladins now wandering into the silent, untouched space of the great hangar. And to his left, Hunk saw her, waiting as though he'd only left her yesterday. His Yellow Lion.

"You're back." she spoke, a mixture of hyper-advanced mental connection and a deep metallic purr that vibrated the very ground beneath him as he walked towards her, heart full of that familiar psychic tug.

"I am," he grinned up at his enormous ship as he patted the alien metal of her forepaw, "Hi baby. Did you miss me?"

"No."

The answer was blunt. Yellow always spoke to him in calm, simple statements, but this one was like a punch to the gut. He looked over at Lance, who pursed his lips and shrugged. Lance wasn't wrong when he said the Lions were more than a little crass about the situation.

"What? Why not?"

A great rumbling echoed across the hangar as the other Lions greeted Hunk and Lance with a flickering of pilot lights and a much more subtle feeling of being watched.

"You weren't gone very long."

"Not according to Lance," said Hunk, thumbing at Lance standing beside him.

Yellow was silent. Lance was scuffing the ice with his boot.

"Look, a year is a very long time in human terms."

"Is it?" The Green Lion chirped, obviously listening in on the conversation. The other Lions rumbled in agreement, auxiliary lights flaring up at each other as they processed this revelation.

Hunk rolled his eyes and turned his back to Lance. "Grab my battery pack, will you?" And Lance popped off the jet pack on Hunk's back, reaching for the heavy grey cartridge stored inside and disengaging it from Hunk's suit. Hunk motioned for Yellow to open up.

After Lance reattached his jet pack, Hunk led the way into the cockpit of his ship, finding the panel in the side wall just behind the pilot's seat where he could plug in his battery and let it charge. Lance collapsed in the wide, cushy chair while Hunk, after turning on the heat, resigned himself to the plastic fold-out passenger's seat behind him.

"Do you need to charge?" He asked.

"Nah," Lance hummed, slinging his leg over the armrest, "I've got about 30% left."

"What time even is it?"

Lance looked over at the dashboard clock. "9:30-ish. Why?"

"Well, do you wanna sleep in here? Because if I'm gonna shoot our way to the stairs, I need to charge my pack. It's not like we can get back through the zip line."

"Actually," Lance leaned his head backwards over the other armrest, grinning a terrible upside-down grin and waving his bayard back at Hunk, "I think I have an idea that can get us out of here real quick!"

"You're not gonna use your sonic resonator indoors."

"I am absolutely going to use the sonic resonator to free us from captivity."

"Jesus, Lance, you're going to puncture the hull!"

"Not if I'm careful! Come on, we don't need to bother with your pack!"

And suddenly Lance was up and dragging Hunk out of the cockpit by the elbow, down the exit ramp and scuttling off towards the Blue Lion who was already causing cracks in the ice as she kneaded her giant metallic legs back and forth.

Hunk turned for one last look at Yellow, who seemed satisfied with their brief interaction after a year of separation. It was as if nothing phased her at all. If she wasn't a metallic construct, Hunk could swear she was smiling.

Blue was lowering her entrance ramp and Hunk was steeling his nerves for the delicate task of trusting Lance to use a weapon of mass destruction in a sealed chamber on such a damaged ship. Yellow's psychic pull tugged at the back of his mind one more time.

"I want to see Shay again."

Shay.

She wanted to see Shay again. After a year. He'd forgotten about Shay. He woke up and spent almost twelve hours with Lance and not at any moment did he think about Shay. He said he'd keep in touch, and now he'd disappeared for a year. She could be dead. He might never even see her again. He forgot about Shay.

Now it was happening. Now the quaking sobs overtook him and he felt dizzy and weak. Hunk fell to his knees as the cold air sank into his body and hot tears erupted from his eyes, splashing down onto the ice.

Shay.

"Hunk, what's wrong? What happened?"

He forced his mouth to form the words, even as his voice refused to comply.

"I... forgot about Shay," he whispered with ragged breath.

Lance was down on his knees, even as he kept glancing between the Blue and Yellow Lions, "You were laying on the floor! You kept saying 'everyone we love is far away', Hunk." Lance was trying to rub his lower back as Hunk heaved and sobbed. "I don't get it, dude."

"I forgot, Lance! I forgot about Shay! We've been gone for a YEAR!" Now was where his voice came, a series of angry, turbulent shrieks of grief, somehow forming into syllables through trembling lips and gritted teeth. "Oh, my god, Lance. I forgot about her. Everything was just… a concept. I just-"

"Oh, fuck," said Lance, "I know. I mean-"

It was hitting him now. The reality. Gone for a year. Lost in space. No friends but Lance by his side. No family. Hunk let out a guttural scream that echoed through the hangar, as the Lions remained eerily silent.

The nausea was here and now, surging through him. Vertigo struck like a bolt of lightning and Hunk fell forward towards the icy floor from his knees, palms smacking the hard ground and barely able to stop his head from hitting it.

He retched once, twice, and then everything came up.

In the back of his mind he could feel Lance removing his helmet, threading his fingers through his hair and sweeping the sweat-soaked strands away from his mouth. He listened quietly as Hunk's stomach emptied its contents and still Hunk screamed into the bitter taste of bile in his mouth.

"You need your headband," said Lance, finally, after Hunk's throat was so raw he felt he must have damaged it.

"In my- pocket," he mumbled as he tried to roll his body away from the puddle of vomit.

"Where?" asked Lance, already fishing around Hunk's belts as he weakly shook his head and tried to swat Lance's invading hands away.

Hunk gulped for breath as the aftershocks of his nausea slowly faded away.

"No. Not- Upstairs."

"Oh," said Lance. "Right."

He'd left it in his pants pocket when he'd changed into his space suit.

"I'll help you wash it later."


	7. 9:37PM 23062065

"Blue… Blue! Shut up, you're _not_ helping!" Lance was shouting up into the hangar from somewhere behind his head, voice echoing off the far walls as his ship rumbled with what Hunk could only describe as a concerned displeasure.

"What's she saying?" he groaned.

"Blue," Lance huffed in sincere dismay, "He does _not_ need repairs, because he does _not_ have a fuel leak!"

Blue got quiet.

"Oh," Hunk managed a small chuckle between dry heaves as Lance continued rubbing his back, "Lion logic."

Minutes passed and Lance remained down on the ice, there with him through the nausea and the smell until Hunk felt like he had a grasp on gravity once again; no longer tumbling through time and space as his anxiety ripped him apart at the seams. He sat himself up, slowly, away from the pool of foul-smelling vomit and wiped his mouth with his fist.

"Hey…"

"Yeah?"

Hunk looked around the hangar, at the massive icicles hanging precariously from the distant ceiling overhead, at the mixture of foreboding mechanical faces staring down at them, anywhere except the fast-cooling puddle in front of him as the last trails of curling steam wafted away along the floor.

"I think I'm hungry now."

"Me too." Lance nodded sympathetically, "Let's go get something to eat and get to bed. I've been up for a lot longer than you. -I think…" Lance caught him rolling his eyes, and Hunk knew that Lance knew he was turning yet another unnecessary thing into a competition. Lance let his hands fall to his sides as his gaze subtly drifted over to his ship. "Nevermind, it's been weird and rough tonight. Sorry. Are you- Do you think you're gonna be ok about Shay?"

He'd have to be, honestly. There wasn't much he could do. He'd already been away from his home and family for months before the attack, mourned that loss with the rest of the Paladins; and now, it was just more time. More hard, unchangeable "fact-ness" hitting him in the face, reminding him that his dreams to design and repair Garrison spacecraft were long ago and far away. He'd have to be ok about Shay if he was going to help get Lance and the rest of the team out of here.

Wherever here was.

"I don't think she's dead, dude." Lance's voice was apologetically soft as he ran his glove along Hunk's forehead, wiping away the hair and sweat one last time. "Don't sell her short. She's a tough little boulder. I mean, I kept it together for a year- I'm sure she did, too. She's probably, like, the general of some resistance army by now, kicking ass and taking names and shit, hey?"

He could imagine that. He could imagine Shay championing the cause of freedom, giving heartfelt speeches full of vitality and compassion to eager crowds across the galaxy. He could see her at the front of some stalwart resistance, feeding the hungry and curing the sick. He could see her on Balmera, keeping the young ones safe. He could see it. It sounded like it could be true. He wanted it to be true. His brain could handle that much.

Hunk tried to make words happen, but all he managed was an open mouth and a slow nod.

Lance was still staring at his ship across the hangar, that same tired look of disappointment and longing settled in his red-rimmed eyes. Like an unfinished argument between lovers, something obviously stung him. Something cold and hard and just between them. Blue's eyes glowed briefly, and Lance turned back to him.

"I always feel better after I barf," Lance offered, trying to fill the void, "You know? Kinda makes you feel calm. Easier to sleep." He slapped Hunk on the back and Hunk coughed up a mouthful of leftover bile and cold air.

"Yeah," he wheezed.

"Come on, big guy," said Lance, standing up, "We'll find some goo left in the machine and have a late dinner."

"Mmkay. But," he grabbed Lance by the elbow as his best friend hauled him up to his feet, "I want to write some stuff down. Grab me a tablet when we get up there?"

"Yeah," Lance replied, "No problem." And then, "So, uh, are we gonna clean this up or just leave it?" He was staring down at the puddle of sickness, which was starting to freeze to the floor.

"Leave it," Hunk shrugged, "We got other priorities right now."

Lance nodded and started leading him once again towards the Blue Lion who was eagerly lowering her entrance ramp. His own Yellow Lion gazed coolly at his back, unknowable ancient emotions pressing gently against Hunk's tired mind.

"Speaking of hungry," Hunk nudged him in the side as they walked under the shadow of Blue's enormous frame, between her two front paws half-sunken in the ice, "How much food is really left in the machine, Lance? No bullshit."

Lance's expression stiffened to a painful wince, like Hunk was touching on another subject he'd rather avoid. But after chewing his lips, unfurrowing his brows and sucking in a deep breath, he finally spoke. "No bullshit, Hunk, I don't know. But it's pretty damn empty. There's still some field ration bars, but not a huge amount. And I'm starting to hate those, too."

"Yeah?" Looking at his emaciated frame, Hunk couldn't help but wonder how much Lance had been eating lately. Or how frequently.

"Yeah, dude. Take a shit, like, once a year."

Well, there was one answer he didn't ask for.

" _Thanks._ "

"You're welcome," Lance beamed, thumping his chest as he lead the way up the ramp, "Also, you just puked in front of me, you have no high ground for being gross."

"True," Hunk admitted. "Yeah, I'll own that one."

They climbed into the back of the cockpit as Blue's internal lights blinked on after a year of quiet hibernation. Hunk found himself poking around at the inside of Lance's ship, at the clean, futuristic design and the distinct lack of… dust. Either Lions were somehow hermetically sealed or they had a way of being self-cleaning. _Interesting_ , he figured. And then his stomach rumbled loudly under his suit.

"Look, if we're not at risk right away of nuclear melt-down or loss of air pressure," said Hunk, offhandedly, while staring at the clean finger he'd run along the inside wall of the ship, "first priority is fixing the food machine, I thi-"

"Oh _god,_ Hunk! That sounds majestic!" And suddenly Lance's arms were thrown around him, and he was leaning his full weight on Hunk's already unsteady legs, and Lance's face was way too close, and the two of them were threatening to crash back down to the floor for the fifth time that night. "I have been waiting a _year_ to hear those precious words," Lance sang, nose practically touching Hunk's own, "I love- that."

And there he was, standing way too close and laughing in Hunk's face with those chapped lips, and that indomitable smile, and Hunk was stuck frozen in time for a fraction of a second. What was he doing? Lance was still looking at him. Why was Lance looking at him like that? Lance stopped smiling. No. Smile again. Was he supposed to say something?

"That... sounds great," Lance coughed as he backed off, arms slipping away from Hunk's sides like they were never there and dangling around his narrow frame as Lance kept folding and unfolding them, leaving Hunk blinking awkwardly in the silence. "...And, um, your breath stinks."

Great.

Hunk slowly raised his cupped hand in front of his face, directly in front of Lance standing there, staring back at him, tapping his thighs and chewing on those chapped lips. Hunk puffed his breath into his hand. Lance wasn't wrong. And suddenly Hunk felt very self-conscious.

"Come on," Lance grinned, whipping his arms out wide, as if he meant to grab Hunk by the hand, but suddenly thought better of it, "I'm about to get us out of here!"

And before Hunk had any chance to wrap his brain around the situation, Lance was off and away, skipping nimbly backwards to pilot seat in three large strides. The dashboard flicked on in response to his presence; bars and scanners booting up and projecting information around on the mobile holoscreens, leaving Hunk at the back of the ship to wonder what the hell just happened, exactly.

Lance sat down and slid his fingers over the holoscreen controls as Hunk quietly sidled up and leaned his elbow over the back of the pilot's chair, trying not to interrupt. Lance remained facing forward, focused on the dashboard with a delicate seriousness like he hadn't been squealing with joy less than a minute ago as he tapped a few commands, urging Blue into action.

"So, do you think you could fix it in, like, maybe a couple days?" He asked, and Hunk could hear the barely suppressed hope Lance was clearly trying to hide in his voice. He tried not to get ahead of himself. Hunk had no idea how bad the damage would be without taking a good look at the castle's innards. But, at the very least, having Lance in charge of their escape freed Hunk to start mentally dissecting the castle's problems.

"Depends. If the food machine's still serving, it might be jammed somewhere along the service line, or it might not even be the machine," he mused, brain now tracing the castle's internal systems, scoping out potential places to start tinkering, "It might be the material cycling systems. If the water's all down here, the food machine has nothing to work with."

"Huh." Lance broke his eyeline away from the dashboard and chanced a curious look at him, "The water down here is our food?"

"And fuel," said Hunk. "For minor energy purposes, y'know, not propulsion and stuff, the ship uses hydrogen combustion for energy. Waste product is water."

"Yeah. I knew that," Lance said, sitting up a little taller in his seat. In the dim blue lighting Hunk could almost perceive a deep flush forming in Lance's cheeks. "Now watch this!"

Lance activated his bayard and jammed it into its socket with more force than necessary, turning it halfway with an artful flourish to summon the Blue Lion's sonic resonator. Blue let out a low roar and the whole ship glowed with an inner light as the massive weapon materialized on her back and Hunk had a terrible, sinking feeling about all of this.

"Be careful, Lance! We could tear through the hull!"

"Relax!" Lance grinned, patting the dashboard, "She knows what she's doing."

"But do you?"

"Nope, no idea."

" _Lance!_ "

"I'm just kidding," he smirked, "I think I've got it figured out. We just need to aim really gently at the ice near the hangar door aaaaand-"

Blue shifted her half-encased body towards the entrance to the lower stairs as Lance finalized the weapons settings and fired. Her sonic beam hit the far wall of the hangar and slowly, steadily, the low vibrations from the gun began to build into a deep and deafening crescendo that rattled through the hangar floor. Up through Blue's body, Hunk could feel the pulsing buzz of sonic energy as Blue aimed her weapon at the ice and he watched helplessly as white, spidering cracks began to form and spread erratically through the giant room.

Hunk was never a very religious boy, but right then and there he was silently praying to any available deity or spiritual force in that moment that they weren't about to rip off the bottom of the weakened hull and tumble into dead space.

"Lance!" He shouted through the reverberating din, "Are you absolutely _sure_ about this?"

"Look, it's working! Like your gun, but mega-size!" Lance was actually laughing as he leaned into the controls, drunk and euphoric on the surge of power at his fingertips after being away, for so long, from a pilot's seat.

All around them the deep crack of solid water breaking under pressure thundered through the hangar as the long, meandering white lines shot through the slick, dark sheet of ice. Sensing the commotion, the Lions started shifting their weight uneasily and ground their metal bodies against the icy entrapment, causing the whole hangar to shake uncontrollably as they thrashed and pulled.

In and out, Hunk forced the air through his lungs. In and out.

And with a final mighty crash, the Blue Lion shattered a jagged crater into the ice around the far exit - large enough for two small human paladins to shovel away the remains and crawl through to the stairs. The vibrations stopped, he opened his eyes, and Hunk released his iron grip from the back of Lance's seat.

"Thanks babe," Lance cooed, patting the dashboard, "I know we've had our differences."

"Who, me or the Lion?"

"Blue."

"Right."

Lance disengaged his bayard from its slot and nodded at Hunk to go check out his handiwork.

"I have good news and bad news," Hunk huffed as he chucked the giant slab of ice onto the pile they were building off the side of the doorway. His arms ached with the effort, and the piece fell with a deep thud, sliding down the pile until it became wedged between two others. The only thing keeping him going at this point was the thought of a half-decent meal and peaceful rest in his bed. As he caught his breath, Hunk looked over his shoulder at the Blue and Yellow Lions staring enigmatically back at them. He'd slept in his Lion before, but never truly got used to it. It was more like camping or a road trip. He preferred the solidity of the castle walls and the quiet hum of distant engines. Besides, it was his stupid idea to go visit the Lions in the first place.

"Good news first," said Lance, scraping at the tiny leftover bits with his hands.

"No, no, that ruins the joke."

Lance stopped and looked up as Hunk went for another large, roughly triangular chunk blocking their way to the upper levels.

"Bad news is that I don't exactly know how to de-ice the hangar," said Hunk.

"And the good news?"

"Once it's done," Hunk grinned sheepishly, "I heard Keith say there was a pool?"

Lance chuckled and stepped forward to help Hunk drag the last giant slab blocking their way.

Up the stairs they went, once again, past the frost and ice, past the midsection where the dust and melting water mixed into a weird, greyish mud. Up, once more, to warmth and light, however little though there was.

"Feels weird to be going up a set of stairs twice without going back down," said Hunk, as his boot squelched into a particularly thick clump of condensation-soaked dust-mud.

"Superstitious?" asked Lance. "You need to turn around twice or something?"

"No," He shook his head, "Just odd. Like a playground slide or a diving board. Always up, but never down."

"Huh." Lance stomped his feet when they reached a higher set of stairs, kicking off the wet greyish grime as they headed into endless layers of dry dust. "Maybe after the food machine we can get the elevators working again?"

Hunk rolled his eyes, feeling a familiar little throb of stress rising in the front of his forehead. "Let's just try to focus on the essentials for now..."

The kitchen.

The safest place in any building, in Hunk's opinion. The heart of food and family and good conversation. Having grown up in a family of powerful matriarchs and gifted chefs, Hunk knew these rooms had a magical way of solving arguments and healing ills; even alien ones with weird appliances and questionable ingredients in deep space. They were sacred to him. Kitchens were where Hunk was home.

This one, however, was cold, and dark, and missing the smell of freshly baked bread and dry spices. It needed laughter and the screaming whistle of a boiling kettle, and the scrape of a knife pushing onions and mushrooms off a cutting board and into a hot pan. Hunk stood beside Lance in the middle of the room, staring at the empty food dispenser and the overflowing garbage bin. It had barely been twelve hours since Hunk awoke in the broken castle, and already its gloom was seeping into him. But he could fix it. He could change it. He just needed a plan.

Too late to shower, too tired to care, Hunk dragged his body over to the dish cabinet, searching for two clean bowls that he suddenly, annoyingly, remembered weren't there. Lance never put their dishes in the washer, much less put them away. When he heard Hunk's deep sigh, Lance looked up at him with innocent eyes from lower cupboard he was already rummaging through as empty food wrappers spilled out onto the floor. Hunk groaned and ambled his way towards the common room to grab his old bowl.

"You said you wanted to jot some stuff down?" asked Lance, following beside him. He'd fished his field ration bar out of the back of the cupboard and was unwrapping it as he spoke.

"Yeah," Hunk nodded, "Can you go find me a tablet, and like, also not fucking scare the shit out of me when you come back?" He grabbed the two bowls that were still laying at the food of the couch and swung back around to the kitchen.

Lance almost choked on his bite. "What?" he laughed, "When I found you outside of Shiro's bedroom? It wasn't that scary! Was it because my hair was wet? Like in The Ring?"

"No." Hunk dropped the bowls and their spoons on the counter, avoiding Lance's impish grin.

"So, what? Was it because half the lights were off and you can't see me?"

"No," Hunk mumbled, head now deep inside a storage cupboard, trying to strategically bury his embarrassment by looking for ingredients. "It was that, and the creepy footsteps. And Shiro's door."

"Dude, I wasn't sneaking up on you! I was right there the whole time!"

After shuffling a bunch of oddly shaped glass containers with Altean labels and a few dusty, vacuum-sealed containers of space-Tupperware around, Hunk found what he was looking for. He pulled out the large circular metal bin and placed it on the counter.

"Yeah, I _know-_ Look, nevermind. Just go grab a tablet, will you?" He unlatched the heavy clamps on the bin and the lid released with a loud hiss of decompression.

Lance left the kitchen with a haunted "ooh" moan, all the while giggling to himself. At least he seemed to be in higher spirits about the whole thing. Hunk turned to dive back into the lower drawers in search of some measuring cups.

He'd used the flour before, though admittedly, being a paladin didn't give him much time to practice. It was denser than wheat, with a sharper flavour, more akin to a rye or spelt. Probably artificially modified for optimal nutrition and low spoilage. The scientist in Hunk appreciated the sturdy elegance of the 10,000 year-old superfood. The organic snob in him despised it.

Lance reentered the room as Hunk knelt on the floor, peering over the top of a measuring cup with his thumb in the water, approximating metric measurements and testing its warmth.

"You can use this one," he said as he lay the tablet down on the kitchen counter and seated himself on the bar stool for a better view. And then promptly swept it back up in his hands.

"What gives?" asked Hunk, holding the cup in both his large palms, trying to warm the icy water in the glass.

"Hold on a sec," Lance mumbled as he chewed his lip, frowning as he started urgently fiddling with the machine. "I just gotta delete some stuff first."

"What stuff?"

"Nothing. It's not important."

Hunk raised an eyebrow over the top of the measuring cup at Lance, who was nervously tapping away at the tablet, little bleeps confirming that he was permanently deleting various files and folders.

"Just some stuff I did when I was bored. And look, I'm doing you a favour. It'll run a lot faster now that I've freed a bunch of space up."

Hunk shrugged, letting Lance lie about what he needed to. So far any time Lance had been "bored" he was obviously trying to cover something embarrassing about his time alone. Maybe he kept a journal or something, and didn't want Hunk to read it. He went back to monitoring the cup of water. It was warm enough, he decided, and Hunk started pouring it slowly into the bowl of sifted flour he'd set aside, stirring the lumps into a smooth, off-white slurry. Lance looked up from his tablet at the mixture of flour and water Hunk was stirring in the bowl.

"Dude, that looks like a pile of jizz."

"Uh-huh." He'd had worse comments made on his cooking before. Some of them by Lance.

"Oh, speaking of that, I was thinking to ask you."

Hunk's eyes widened in their sockets.

"Ok, _One,_ " said Hunk, lowering the spoon and counting off on his fingers, "Jizz. And _Two,_ asking me something. First of all, _no._ Secondly, _not while I'm cooking._ "

Lance dismissed the criticism with an airy hand-wave as he slid the tablet back towards Hunk. "I'm just, like, still thinking about it."

"About what?" He picked up the tablet, watching the status bar fill as it slowly deleted Lance's massive selection of files.

"The radiation," he sighed. "What if I can't have kids anymore? You know? That's it for me, man. No little Lances."

"Well," said Hunk, thinking more about the tablet in his hands than Lance's endless personal insecurities, "Did you try jerking off when you were all alone?"

Lance paused.

"...yeah…"

"Oh, cool, who to?"

"Fuck off."

"Well, did it work?"

"Yeah."

"Then you should be good to go, man."

Lance balled up his empty bar wrapper and threw it at Hunk, bouncing it off the side of his head. "That doesn't mean everything is fine! What about my sperms? What if they're all shriveled and broken or disabled? Like, what if they're all in, like, little spermy wheelchairs and they're tryna swim but they can't make it? What then, Hunk?"

Hunk rolled his eyes and threw the wrapper back at Lance.

"Then they get those free parking passes in your nuts. And people in wheelchairs are just as capable as you or I, and- This conversation got weird again."

That was when he saw it. The message window on the tablet that popped up, just as all those files finished deleting.

 _Error: could not be deleted because it is still in use. Do you want to close the program and try again?_

. So Lance was keeping track of his time alone. That's what he was deleting. More evidence of whatever weird, cryptic shit he'd been doing during that year. Hunk loved Lance. A lot. And he wanted Lance to be safe and happy and free from the prison that was this castle. But like the scuffed dust upstairs by the bedrooms or Shiro's shrine, Lance had secrets. Lots of them. And Hunk maybe wasn't the most blindly dedicated friend.

His thumb brushed over the cancel button, saving the file.


	8. 10:36PM 23062065

"Ok, first things first," Hunk sighed as he tapped open a bulleted list on the notepad section of the tablet, "Fix the food machine." He looked over at Lance who was standing in front of the food goo dispenser, sizing up the machine with Hunk's empty bowl in his hand.

"Sounds good," said Lance.

Hunk typed in his first bullet point. "You know it doesn't matter how you hit it, right?"

"Yeah, it does." Lance looked like he was about to get into a bar fight with an appliance. "Trust me."

"Now _you're_ the one being superstitious." Hunk tried to force his eyes back down to the list in his hand to avoid the serial mechanical abuse happening right in front of him, but Lance's flashy kung-fu stance was hard to ignore.

"Am not. I know what I'm doing. You just gotta hit it, like-"

One high-pitched shriek and a heavy kick to the upper left corner later, the food goo machine rattled into life, coughing out an airy half-portion into Lance's waiting bowl.

"See?" He grinned.

"Grats," said Hunk, "And we need to check on life support and find out what's wrong with the air and water circulation."

"You get used to the grinding-pipes noise, you know." Lance placed the bowl on the island and slid it towards him, taking a seat on the opposite stool. Hunk, despite his distaste for Lance's methods, gratefully took a bite. "I bet you haven't even noticed the past little while."

Truthfully, he hadn't. Hunk thought back to their time examining the bridge or down in the hangar or coming back up the stairs. With everything going on, he'd pretty much filtered the ambient groans of their damaged ship out, though he still noticed the unsettling temperature drops without life support in his suit.

"Three," he swallowed his mouthful, "Check medical bay and make sure the pods are still working."

Lance made a disgruntled cough.

"Yeah?" Hunk looked up from the screen, over at Lance, who was now chewing one of his pathetically short nails and grimacing. He waited for Lance to speak.

"Just…" Lance craned his neck to the side. He was making that high-pitched nasal whine again that meant he couldn't find the right words. "Ok. Just make sure you don't unplug any of them by accident, ok?"

"I won't," said Hunk.

"Just make _sure,_ ok?"

"I will."

"Hunk, it's important."

"I know, Lance."

"But it's _really-_ "

" _Lance._ "

Lance swung his body back and forth on the swiveling bar stool, obviously wanting to say more, but keeping his mouth shut for the time being. He huffed a deep sigh and reached down to grab the crumpled bar wrapper from the floor.

"Ok," said Hunk, a little more gently this time, "I hear you." He watched for a moment as Lance kept crumpling the tiny cellophane ball between his fingers and rolling it in his palms, smaller and tighter. He didn't say anything.

"Would a star make you happy?" Hunk offered. Lance looked over at him with tired, uncertain eyes. "I'll put three stars next to it. Don't unplug anyone," said Hunk, "Don't fuck up our family."

Lance let out the little breath he was holding. He was still looking at Hunk.

"Number Four - Check the engines and the teludav to see if we can get out of here."

"We can't." Lance was now poking at Hunk's flour mixture in the bowl, stirring its thick contents around with the spoon.

Of course not. Of course they couldn't just boot up the engines and take off. Half the ship was barely holding together much less functional. It'd take days just to examine the ship, much less start repairs, much less have all the materials...

"Yeah. _I know,_ " Hunk sighed, "I'm getting there. Number Five - Try to figure out how bad the bridge meltdown is and a way to decontaminate it. Number Six - "

"-That's one bullet point?" Lance piped up again, slapping the wet flour mixture with the back of the spoon.

"Just…" Hunk pinched his brow and rubbed his bleary eyes, "Yeah."

"I dunno, dude…" Lance was slowly stirring the mixture again, lifting it up and watching as it dripped and glopped back into the bowl.

"I'm putting it down as one."

"Seems like it would be-"

" _Lance._ "

Lance rolled his eyes.

"Figure out how to de-ice the hangar," said Hunk, tapping in each note with deliberation as the list slowly grew in front of him, "Check the ship's framework to assess structural damage from the attack. See? We're getting there. Just one thing at a time."

And they were. Writing down a list had always helped Hunk, and Hunk had always helped Lance when his brain couldn't handle the myriad tasks that life of the Garrison set in front of him. Lance inspired Hunk. Hunk kept Lance on track. And together, they could do this. Just one thing at a time.

"And below the main stuff, we can make a list for non-essential stuff like cleaning and sleep schedules, ok?"

Lance's eyes moved away from the spoon to Hunk. "What about main power?"

"Fuck. Fuck me," Hunk groaned, "Can't run this ship on a broken crystal." He clenched his fingers around the machine and bent over, curling into the tablet in his hands as the weight of his stress and anxiety began revving up their assault on his nerves.

"Where are we gonna get it?"

"I don't _know,_ " moaned Hunk, sinking onto the counter.

"That's why I said it's _more_ than one-"

"Hey, Lance?" Hunk attempted through gritted teeth.

Lance fumbled the spoon into the bowl.

"Can you _not? Please?_ For _one_ second?"

"Sorry." Lance started trying to fish the half-sunken spoon out with his fingers as Hunk cringed, swatting Lance's dirty paws away. "I'm just… excited I guess. Anxious."

"I know," said Hunk, "Me too."

" _You know,_ you could always make it a sub-bullet."

God fucking damn it.

Hunk slammed his fists on the island counter and Lance jerked back in surprise at the sudden violence, flinging the spoon against the far wall behind Hunk's head where it hit the cupboard and landed on the counter with a wet splat. Hunk kneaded his was supposed to help him get organized. This was supposed to help him de-stress. This was supposed to be the plan that helped him get his brain in order and jump-start their rescue mission.

Looking at it now, the words physically hurt to read, and Lance was only making things that much worse.

"...I was just trying to help..." he mumbled, and Lance stood up off his seat, moving around the counter towards the door. Hunk's stomach sank.

"Wait."

"What?" He stopped. "I'm not leaving. I'm just grabbing the spoon."

"Ok," said Hunk, wiping the tiny droplet of batter off of his cheek with his thumb, "Good. Thanks. Sorry." And Lance finished his slow saunter around the rim of the island as Hunk's eyes gravitated back to the list in his hands, embarrassed and subdued.

Hunk didn't hear Lance grab the spoon from the counter, nor did Hunk hear him move around much behind him while he typed. He only saw the crook of his arm and a few long fingers as Lance place the spoon delicately, silently in front of him. Clean.

"Find an alternate power source," said Hunk. Lance leaned against his shoulder.

The list took more time than expected, and two bowls of food later looked something like this.

 **URGENT**

Fix food machine

Assess needed parts

See if parts are in storage

Examine raw materials for repair

Check Life support

Examine air circulation and "grinding noise"

Make sure ventilation bypasses irradiated areas

Examine water circulation in hangar

Check for contamination

Examine medical bay for power

Make sure all occupants are ok***

Stabilize power supply from old crystal

Examine bridge

Make sure bridge contamination not leaking

Seal outer blast doors to prevent further leaks

Find way to eject crystal and decontaminate

Check computer systems

Check main engines

Check internal structure for weaknesses or breaches

Examine raw materials for repair

Check teludav

Probably re-align scaltrite lenses

Replace broken

Examine bridge

Find alternate power source for bridge

install

 **NON-URGENT**

De-ice hangar

Cycle water back into life support and fuel systems

Try to wake teammates (if possible)

Clean up messy / hazardous areas of ship

Repair suits

 **OPTIONAL**

Pool

Hunk stared down at the list, index finger sliding up and down its length as he swallowed the last of his bite. Maybe he was overthinking it. Maybe he was just tired and needed to sleep. After hovering around the back of his shoulder for a while Lance had gone back to his stool and settled into a silent, anxious boredom as Hunk modified their tasks, looking for something he may have missed.

"And then, I guess, we just need to find out exact location and plot a course back to known space." He placed the tablet back down on the counter and rolled his shoulders, feeling the satisfying crack as he stretched his neck.

"I told you, I know where we are," Lance grumbled into his forearms. He'd been awfully quiet for the last little while, having run out of energy and things to fidget with. Hunk stared down his nose at him, far beyond ready for bed.

"Where, besides way the fuck away from Earth, are we, Lance?"

Lance stretched his arms out front, yawning."I'm not- I don't think you should really know, dude. It's late. It's been a long day full of horror and bullshit."

Hunk was unconvinced. "Just tell me while we're at it."

"No."

" _Why?_ "

"I don't want to just dump it all on you," he shrugged.

"I don't care. Do it. I can take a dump, Lance."

"You, uh... You wanna rephrase that?"

"Fuck you. Tell me."

"Ugh. Fine. Give that here. I'll show you."

A brief spike of icy panic shot through Hunk as Lance ripped the tablet from his hands and started flipping silently through the programs and applications. He watched with baited breath, wondering if Lance was going to discover his undeleted file on the hard drive. The look on his face said no, Lance was none the wiser, and Hunk bit down on his his lip as Lance booted up a miniature glowing holomap, placing it down on the counter between them. The projected image spawned several inches above the tablet and centred around a slowly rotating blue sphere.

"This planet, the default, I assume- is old Altea." Lance adjusted the size and clarity of the map with his fingers as he spoke, pinching and pulling at the air on the counter between them.

Hunk interjected. "That means this map is over 10,000 years old."

Lance glared at him from across the island counter, blue illumination from the hologram catching harshly in his eyes. "And it's not gonna matter anytime soon, Hunk. because 10,000 lightyears of movement means fuckall in _our_ situation."

Lance reached in and pinched the hologram once more to zoom out.

"This is Altea's old planetary system." He pinched again, "This is the local star grouping."

Lance pinched a few more times.

"This is the stellar arm, and this-" he motioned to a swirling mass of milky stars rotating slowly on the kitchen counter, "Is the Pegasus Irregular Dwarf Galaxy."

"Ok, so? We're outside of Allura's home galaxy," Hunk yawned, "So what? We hop galaxies with the teludav all the time."

"No, we haven't even started yet, Hunk. We're outside the fucking universe. Visible light hasn't reached us yet. I'm talking time-travel here. Pre-big bang. I'll show you."

Lance kept pinching and pinching, and his movements grew broader and more forceful, grabbing at the edges of the hologram with his entire arm span as he pulled ever outward on their visuals.

"This is the local Virgo cluster, and- there's the Milky Way, by the way. That dot over there- Hi mom."

Hunk blinked at the tiny, unidentifiable smattering of dots Lance must have pored over for an entire year.

"And this," Lance used his whole arm span to push the hologram's limits one more time, "is the Laniakea Supercluster surrounding the Great Attractor, opposite the Perseus-Pegasus filament. The largest known object in the universe."

Rotating before them was a miniature version of a massive, fern-like structure, gracefully unfurling as arms of galaxies swirled in a cosmic pattern of gravity and energy around a mysterious black void.

"So where are we?"

Lance pinched at the hologram a few more times until it stopped moving and emitted a low beep of protest. Nowhere, in this entire holographic model, did the cursor of their ship appear.

"We're not on the map, Hunk."

"I thought you said you knew where we are?"

"Well," said Lance, and he started pulling at the unfurling fronds of Laniakea, moving them towards the end of tip of the island, "Look behind you."

There, on the other side of the kitchen, in the far corner, faint and hovering near the wall was a tiny yellow dot.

"That's…"

If the distance between the dots in the hologram Lance held near his palms represented millions of lightyears…

"...We're so far away."

He stared up and down at it, lips numb, fingers clutching the tablet as his vision started to blur from total exhaustion. That was it. That was enough. If there was another task to add to the list, he'd add it later. Hunk shut the hologram off, as conceptual distances buzzed inside his head.

He needed a moment. Maybe ten.

Lance was about to reach for the bowl of flour mixture again, so Hunk cut him off, swiping the bowl up and placing in on an out-of-the-way section of the far counter near the oven.

"Don't touch this," he said, pointing at the bowl. Lance nodded.

Hunk found a dish towel in one of the drawers and covered the bowl with it. "I'm serious. It needs to sit for ten days. Don't touch it." And then, "Lets go to bed."


	9. 11:05PM 23062065

Lance was silent while he grabbed both their helmets and left the kitchen, trudging up the stairs to the dorms. Hunk made a go for the tablet, tucking in under his arm, and fixing a mental note to back up Lance's file and hide it somewhere on the drive where Lance wouldn't be able to find it. Just until he'd taken a closer look.

"List help you at all?" Hunk asked, quashing his wave of guilt.

"Maybe-" Lance stopped when he realised Hunk was heading towards his bedroom. "You're not gonna shower before bed?"

"No."

"You smell."

"You smelled worse."

Lance shrugged. "I had nobody around to smell me."

Hunk's attention flickered back to a few hours ago in the upper hallways, before their journey began. Before he had any idea what was really going on and Lance had appeared out of nowhere like some cheap horror movie villain.

"Wait, so why _were_ you soaking wet when you came out of the shower?"

Lance shrugged and carefully shifted his gaze away from Hunk. "The towels fell on the floor a while ago, and then they got all gross and slimy." He coughed, staring very deliberately at the ceiling, "And I didn't wanna touch them."

Hunk snorted. "Wait, wait. So the whole reason you scared the shit out of me was because you didn't do _laundry?_ Good god, Lance."

"No, I did! You saw it! It's on the bed! I'll show you!"

"You mean _my_ bed," said Hunk as his tired muscles screamed at him for climbing yet another set of stairs, "And how often did you sleep in it?"

"Only when I needed to."

"How often was that?"

Lance waved his hand with an air of casualty. "I'll help you clean it all up. Don't worry about it."

Hunk rolled his eyes. And yet, instead of reeling from Lance's dismissive sideswiping the conversation, he felt the resurgence of a kind of warm familiarity bubbling between them. This was, in essence, the Lance he knew. This was the Lance who pushed his assignments to the last minute, who forgot his lunch, who stayed up all night cramming and needed Hunk to bring him a warm mug of tea come morning and help him get the dishes started. Lance made messes. Hunk made him clean them up. It was how they worked.

"Ok then," Hunk sighed, "Number-one priority before we go to bed; you're helping me get rid of that vile bowl of food in my bedroom that you covered up with toilet paper."

Lance lurched on the spot. "Fuck. Sorry."

"Honestly how old is- why didn't- Lance it's _gross._ "

"I know! I know!" Lance whined, gripping the two helmets as he leaned against his bedroom doorway, "I was missing you, Hunk, so I went to eat in your room, and then I got sad. And then I spilled my bowl and it made me sadder. And then I tried to clean it up, but I was too sad. And then being that sad made me sadder. And then I was too sad to do anything, so I left it."

"You're depressed, Lance."

"I know," he shrugged, suppressing a tiny hiccup so pathetic he reminded Hunk of some kind of abandoned three-legged puppy.

The room looked worse than he remembered it. Hunk's closet still spilled forth with all his collection of alien tinkering all over the floor and that run of toilet paper encircled his room several times, ending in a disgusting clump at the foot of his bed. Lance was grinning a pained and guilty grin beside him as Hunk pointed to the main culprit.

"Bowl."

Lance scrambled around the room sweeping up the tissue and spilled bowl of old food into his arms while Hunk decided to tackle the pile of laundry on the bed. He dig into the lumpy mass and pulled out a pair of his pants, folding it into a neat square. And an undershirt. And a red sock.

"Uh, Lance? These aren't just mine. These are definitely Keith's socks. What's with everyone's dirty clothes on the bed?"

"What?" Lance poked his head out from Hunk's bathroom as Hunk heard Lance try to flush the broken toilet one more time. "That's all clean laundry! Well.. sort of."

"It's not clean if you leave it for weeks without folding it!"

"It was WARM, Hunk! I got _sleepy!_ "

* * *

When Hunk decided that his bedroom was livable enough to fall asleep in, and his eyes could barely stay open either way, he relieved Lance of his indentured servitude and once alone, gradually began peeling off his sweaty, mildly radioactive armor. He found his own pajama robe miraculously clean in the pile of slept-in laundry and it felt like silk and clouds going over head head and cascading down his naked skin. And it smelled like Lance. Hunk stared longingly over at his bed, but the itch at the back of his mind wouldn't let him get in until he made one last stop.

Lance opened his door wearing his own Altean pajamas, and Hunk's stomach sank as he saw the way the robe hung off of Lance's emaciated body like wire clothes hanger, the wide mouth of the collar exposing a prominent collarbone. Fix the food machine. Number one priority. Lance cocked his head expectantly.

"Nothing," Hunk replied to Lance's raised eyebrow, "Just… get some sleep, man. A full rest restores all your HP."

Lance yawned. "I have a debuff called insomnia. You gonna brush your teeth?"

"No."

Hunk brought him in for a one-armed squeeze and Lance slapped his back before they broke apart and Hunk turned to leave. Lance's door ground shut behind him on its broken tracks, and moments later Hunk found himself in his own bed with the covers pulled up to his chin and the temperature rapidly dropping.

So this was what life was like for Lance.

Hunk lay awake in the cold dark of his room, no different from any other area of the castle, no way to tell time except to look at an arbitrary number on his bedside table. The soft blue glow of the clock illuminated the leftover junk strewn around him room and Hunk tried to not think about sleeping like this for a year. The castle didn't help. The castle was the whole problem.

Everywhere he looked, he saw another problem, another project on a long and spiralling list of exhausting chores. He knew he needed to rest, but his brain kept rearranging tasks, and pushing the schedule they'd made around and around in terms of urgency. Everything needed immediate attention.

The walls groaned. Hunk wondered how cold it was going to get.

There was obviously something really wrong with the heating and air circulation. Sounded like there was water or something gurgling in the vents, dripping inside the walls. Maybe it was a reaction to some other system's cascading failure, or maybe it was just the dust.

The castle's grunts and groans reminded him of a sick child, complaining of lack of care, speaking the language of engineers and architects, begging for attention. Every creak spoke of structural problems and jammed pipes and systems malfunctioning.

Bang.

The sudden noise made Hunk fly up in his bed, eyes darting around in a blind panic. The noise was loud, sudden and terribly close. Hunk's jaw clamped shut as his heart thrummed in his chest. Then he realised.

Shiro's door.

Annoyed more at his own overreaction, Hunk bumped that fix up to first priority and rolled over, curling the blanket up to his chin and willing himself into slumber.

Tap tap tap.

That wasn't shiro's door. Softer that the sudden jolt, fading in and out. Just on the other side of the hall. _Footsteps?_ Hunk's groggy brain offered. _Lance._

Tap tap tap tap.

There he was, the walking insomniac.

Up and down the hall, minute after minute, length after length Hunk waited, listening to those soft, nervous footsteps pacing back and forth. _Come inside,_ he sent out telepathically to the void. _Just knock. Just come inside, I don't care._ The pacing continued.

Tap tap tap tap.

He was about to call out, about to say that he was still awake and could Lance _please_ go to bed, but he kept it to himself. Lance probably didn't want to know he'd been listening.

And then it got quiet. Really quiet.

Maybe he just needed a bit more exercise before bed? Who knew with this version of Lance. Hunk sighed, scrunching his eyes, trying to bury his face in the pillow. He was still Lance, still goofy and brave and charming, but now... He was something else as well. Hunk didn't like it.

It was several minutes before Hunk heard the knock on his door.

"I'm awake."

The door dragged open. Silence.

"... Yes?"

"Can I sleep with you, or are you still mad about the wheelchair thing?"

Hunk rolled over to face the door and make out traces of Lance's dark silhouette against the frame.

"I mean…" Lance coughed, "Just on the floor- No homo or anything."

"Dude, you were just lying with me on the couch, like six hours ago. And earlier you said you _loved_ me."

He could see Lance's shape shifting about uncomfortably.

"Yeah, Uh, I didn't- don't want it to be weird between us."

Hunk sat up, more awake than ever. "Well _now it's weird_ when you're suddenly declaring no homo, as if homo were suddenly implied before."

"It wasn't! It was a _cautionary_ no homo!"

"Like, Hold on." Hunk fluffed his pillow in front of him. Now this was getting scientific. "When you say it once, does that negate one single instance of previous homo? or is it a sweeping veto that erases all previous and future potential incidents of homo?"

"The second one. I retroactively negate all previous interpretations of said interactions that could be construed as homo."

Hunk watched as Lance leaned behind the door grabbing the large lump that was his blanket and pillow.

"So can I sleep with you?"

"Yeah."

* * *

"Why did you bring it up then?" Hunk asked, as Lance lay on the floor beside him, tucked into a makeshift bed of extra blankets and Hunk's vest laid out on top.

"What?"

"When we were on the couch, you specifically mentioned that night we had a sleepover back at the Garrison. Why'd you bring it up?"

He could hear Lance rubbing his face with his hands, muffling his words. "I don't know, I just thought of it. It was a random thought. We were all cuddled together and it reminded me of then. That's it. Does it bother you?"

"No, but it seems like it bothers you."

"What does?"

"The whole homo bit. Just- Whatever, Lance. Do what you need to do."

* * *

Hunk dreamt a lot that night. He wouldn't have considered them nightmares. They were more like annoyance-mares, the kind of dreams that irritate you with their illogical impossibility and leave you waking up irrationally angry for no particular reason. Except he knew the reason.

Even in his dreams, Hunk was fixing the ship. He'd start on one single pipe, but the tool in his hand would disappear, and then a hundred more cracks would emerge along the shaft until the pipe shattered under his touch. He'd be welding a join on one of the castle's frames, but no matter how hot he heated the filler rod, it just wouldn't fuse. It dripped and crumbled and cooled into a useless blackened mess. Something exploded behind him. Above him. The walls and roof were falling down all around him. He couldn't get to safety. He didn't have enough time to save Lance or any of them.

Hunk dreamed of wandering that tiny, claustrophobic corridor in the upper levels again. Dreamt of feeling the metal wall warped by incredible force under his touch, the leftovers from some massive impact. He strained to remember what happened a year ago from the fragments he could pick apart and the pieces Lance had filled in. But it didn't make sense. Hundreds of simultaneous explosions has gone off inside the ship, yes. But not a single one should bend the hull inward. Hunk's eyes snapped open and he held himself deathly still, hearing Lance's soft snoring from below.

That damage came from the outside.

Hunk found himself lying awake at the space-equivalent of 5:30 in the morning. Lance was asleep beside him on the floor, breath still steady and even. He looked peaceful for once, as Hunk leaned over the bed, watching him breathe. Hunk spent a little too long staring at Lance as his eyes twitched under his lids, and his eyelashes fluttered ever so slightly.

He couldn't go back to sleep. He had too many problems to think about. Where they were. Where they were going. How to wake up their badly injured teammates from broken machinery. How to fix their failing ship single-handedly before they all died. That last part was probably what was keeping him awake.

Lance muttered something under his breath.

Hunk needed a walk. Maybe it was a bad idea, and he'd slip and die or get killed by whatever mysterious ghost-figure seemed to be following him around, but Hunk didn't care. He needed to movie his body to think. Maybe get a snack.

Hunk carefully maneuvered himself over Lance's sleeping form and slipped his feet into his trusty boots. He gave one of them a hard shove and panicked as Lance snorted in his sleep, but he rolled onto his back, still dead to the world, and Hunk let the breath he was holding go.

He opened his door as quietly as he could, Lifting the plate with his shoulder so it wouldn't grind along its tracks as it slid open, and he was out in the hallway, safe to make a bit more noise.

He shouldn't have looked back.

Lance's blanket was falling off of him, and he looked so vulnerable with his gaunt cheeks and thin wrists. Hunk let the door close behind him as he walked back in.

He was going to wake him up. This was dumb. But as Hunk hovered over Lance, tucking the blanket up around his chin, Lance licked his lips and sighed, something in his dream clearly satisfying, giving him the first real, genuine, unrestrained smile Hunk had seen since Lance woke up.

And then he kissed him.

Just on the cheek. Just a peck. Hunk had no idea why he did it, just that he wanted to. Wanted Lance to feel safe and warm and loved. Lance rolled onto his side and mumbled under his breath and Hunk willed himself not to have another panic attack.

"Thanks, mom," Lance whispered, and his body returned to its same, slow, rhythmic rise and fall.

Hunk left the bedroom without disturbing him any more.

* * *

Where to go now?

The castle was his playground, and Hunk dug into that ever-present thought that this is what Lance lived like for a year. He plodded down the dusty hallway, following the footprints Lance had tracked up and down the floor. He wasn't headed in any particular direction when-

Bang.

Shiro's door slammed open. He was going to fix that door or get used to it, damn it. Hunk went inside. Maybe he could find a shoe or something to jam it. Shiro's room looked a little cleaner than the rest. No. maybe cleaner wasn't the right word. Untouched. Lance had made himself at home in all the other beds, but this one seemed… reserved for special occasions.

Despite it being obviously slept in, the covers were somewhat made, and as Hunk leaned in closer he began to see the dull traces of finger spirals in the dust on the walls and table. All around the room Lance had drawn those circles, radiating outward from his… shrine of objects. Maybe it was all just a catholic thing.

Hunk took a seat at the edge of the ring of spirals and circles, gingerly running his fingers along Keith's knife as it lay on the floor, untouched for a year. He remembered flashes of Keith in battle, fighting hard, always outnumbered and still going strong.

He bumped Coran's cube with his hand and it glowed softly at the touch, questioning his use. Coran who was like a father to them all. Allura, his sister and leader, Pidge his best friend and Shiro, hero to the garrison, gone before his time and without ceremony. But here, he guessed, lance could give them their dues. Keep the memory alive as he waited endlessly, holding out hope.

Maybe in some way, Hunk thought, maybe the shrine made sense.

Hunk made another dumb decision that morning. He crept back to his room, back to Lance still snoring, feet still poking out from under the blankets despite the cold, and quickly, quietly made his way over to his desk drawer.

Lance wouldn't have touched this. He would have thought of it as any other rock. Hunk grabbed the small green pebble and made his way back to Shiro's room, cupping it in his hands.

He took the rock, a gift to him, cast off from her shoulder and given to him as a remembrance and placed Shay's stone in its own sacred circle amongst the rest.

He stayed there for a moment, quietly remembering his friends, his family and those closest to him as Hunk wept a few silent but fiercely determined tears. He stayed there, rearranging his pajama robe against the cold draft and shivering in his boots until he heard the voice.

A whisper.

"Come find me in the dark."

Hey guys, thanks for reading! This story was originally published on Archive of Our Own, which allows for more custom media formatting. The upcoming chapters will have Lance's journal, which I will try to format for , but I apologize if it looks messy.


	10. 5:36AM 24062065

A/N: I apologise for formatting errors. This story was originally published on Ao3, which allows for custom CSS, which was used fro lance's journal entries. It looks a lot better there than here.

Who? Or what? A Ghost? _Lance?_

No, Lance was sleeping. And that voice didn't sound anything like him. Hunk's eyes slowly wandered the dim room, waiting, hoping and dreading another sound. He paused, hand still hovering over Shay's stone as if that might have some superstitious effect on the outcome. Half cold, half terrified, he stayed there. Crouched next to the strange shrine, straining for any sign or symbol from the mysterious voice.

"Could you… Uh, could you maybe specify _the dark?_ "

Silence answered Hunk. A lone draft drifted into Shiro's room from the hall. After nothing came for what seemed like minutes, his legs were starting to cramp, and he figured he wasn't going to get another message. He began to stand, slowly, stiff muscles creaking, feeling the rush to his head threatening his consciousness. Hunk made a mental note to limit his future crouching.

Dark. _Come find me in the dark._ Ok. Well, first off, _huge_ process of elimination. The entire castle was pretty damn dark.

What did Lance say? It was Blue talking to him through the ship?

That made sense. Special bond and all. Maybe it was Yellow. Maybe she just missed him. Hunk tried to replay the voice in his mind. Filtering, concentrating, trying to feel if it matched up to the strange psychic vibes that Yellow used when she shot something into his brain. Hard to tell, honestly.

If nothing else, Lance had heard the voice before. And Hunk knew where he'd have made a note about it.

Third time, back in the bedroom, and Lance was still out like a light, thankfully. Hunk grabbed the tablet and his vest as Lance snored peacefully at the foot of his bed. He scooted away once again before his luck ran out.

It was down the hallway several paces before Hunk felt safe enough to boot up the tablet. He instinctively covered his thumb over the speaker as it made its little boop noise and blinked into life. Hunk thumbed casually through the files and folders as he made his way downstairs.

Turned out Lance had a lot packed in there. The journal was a hodge-podge of various files, some text, some audio and video going all the way back to the bombing one year ago.

Hunk flicked back to the oldest entry. Just a plain text document. He breathed one last sigh of guilt and regret over invading Lance's privacy and opened the file. Might as well start at the very beginning of this mess.

 **Text files saved:** ** _308\. Enable autoreader?_**

Hunk hit no.

1  
25/05/2064  
12:01

I'm not really sure how to do this. Captain's log, I guess? stardate May 25th, 2064.

Everything went to shit.

It's been 12 hours since the attack my ears are still buzzing. I'm the only one awake to keep track of anything, so im starting this journal to keep track. I'm doing ok, mostly scrapes adn bruises. The others got hit worse.

I put everyone in the medical pods right away, so hopefully they'll heal up soon and we can figure out where we are. Power is shitty and goes on and off. I think the bridge got a lot of damage. I don't know whta happened but the treaty meeting between the Olkari, the New Aldor Republic and Voltron exploded. Everyone was a robot bomb. I don't know if their Galra.

I can't navigate because I can't see any stars outside. We might be in a dust cloud, so I'll try to get to the long range stellar scan when I'm not tired.

Lance

2  
26/05/2064  
22:03

Robot skell.s everywhere.

Lance

3  
26/05/2064  
09:10

Something is really wrong.

I checked the stellar map and it says we're so. Fucking far away.

Weird thing happened after I used the long-range scan. Felt like the whole ship was hit with a ton of bricks but nothing came up on the defense controls. Might be down. We're sittign ducks out here.

Attacked? Lance didn't mention anything about that yesterday. Granted, it was a year ago and Lance had a lot to fill him in on. But that corridor. The one where the metal was bent inwards. That could answer a few questions and open up a whole lot more...

I feel nauseous. I'm not sure if it's from looking at the map, but the crystal on the bridge has a huge crack in it, and the room is glowing. Looks weird. I patched all available stable power to go to medical bay and support the pods. Life support for the rest of the ship and non-essential rooms shut down.

Lance

4  
27/05/2064  
15:18

Something's wrong with the ship's core controls. Sometimes proximity alarms will go off for no reason like we're about to impact, but there's nothing out there. And then I can't shut it off. Some kind of defense code override. I'm locked out. Fcuking alarm im gonna smash it.

Lance

The rolling grumble in his stomach drew Hunk towards the Kitchen as he wandered his way towards the hangar. A quick detour for a snack wouldn't hold him up too much.

His fingers instinctively flicked over the light switch, and then Hunk remembered for the hundredth time that they were running on emergency power. There would be no more light than the soft, eerie blue glow surrounding him and the cold drafts of a broken air filtration system.

First things first. Hunk tossed a handful of flour in his mixing bowl. He gazed mournfully across the counter at the battered and abused food goo machine as he stirred his frustrations into the wet slurry. Surely their problems could be solved without violence. Surely. Something just had to be jammed in there.

He put the bowl back down. Bread wouldn't be ready for another week.

Hunk tapped the machine gently, skillful hands running up and down its surface and tongue carefully hitched in that investigative position as he squinted down the extrusion pipe. But nothing happened, save for a few whirring clicks and sputtered coughs of air. Hunk wasn't too concerned. He was already mentally digging into the filters and tubes, wondering where that jam was that was bringing the whole system down.

Besides, he was getting to that list, wasn't he? First priority: Fix the food machine. Lance would be happy. He was just getting a head start.

5  
28/05/2064  
09:12

Ok, alarm goes away after a while. Maybe ran out of battery? Or were not in danger anymore

Lance

6  
29/05/2064  
11:39

Went back to check the pods. Power seems stable, but nobody has an exit timer. Just a percent. Not sure if injuries or power. Could really use coran right now.

Coran - 22%  
Allura - 15%  
Pidge - 30%  
Keith - 39%  
Hunk - 33%

Shiro's still gone, but that's not exactly news.

The dust has settled a bit, and there's no robots or anything left on the ship.

Very quiet

Guess I just get to settle in and wait for a while.

Lance

Fuck, this was turning into a project and not a meal. The floor was littered with loose parts and Hunk's hands were covered in food goo and he was no closer to a fix. He'd disassembled the outer framework, finding nothing but old, crusted jams and unnecessary kick-based dentations.

Maybe there was something behind that 90-degree joint that filtered the goo into the pressure chamber just before the hose. But then there was that rubber O-ring covering it. Looked like it had slipped out of place. He just had to pick out. Carefully. Just a little- fuck, he had such big, uselessly stubby fingers.

7  
30/05/2064  
19:03

Went back to teh bridge to check the map, but room weirdly covered in crstals and way too hot. Had to get out. Bad idea.

Walking into a radiation meltdown, Lance? No, really. Go right in. Have a teaparty in there.

8  
02/06/2064  
12:01

Not the map.

Feel like siht

Help

There it was.

9  
07/06/2064  
13:53

Im diyng

Jesus.

Hunk set the pad down. Sarcasm wasn't helping. He just felt like shit. Lance was suffering and alone and he couldn't help. He wasn't there for him. Somehow, Lance crawled his body over the medical bay, and lived in there for the weeks it took to get over the massive dose of radiation cooking his system. And… he got better. No matter what, Lance got better. He wasn't helpless. Lance was a fighter, and he'd help them all get back. Safe and sound.

Hunk bit his lip. Just a little more finagling this O-ring. Something pressurized behind it. And-

Pop.

The gush of food goo spat out with destructive force as the air chamber released, and Hunk's face was an artistic canvas of old, jammed-up space rations.

The backlog of built-up food oozed out and dribbled down the front of the machine like geyser of slime. Hunk kept trying to wipe it away with a cloth, but more and more kept flowing out. And he was nowhere nearer to getting breakfast.

Time to admit defeat.

Hunk cleaned his hands and wiped up whatever leftover goo was still on his face, picking the little globs out of his hair. And he definitely did not eat any of this hair goo because that would be disgusting and it was a good thing there was no one around for millions of lightyears to notice if he did.

Hunk grabbed a ration bar from the cupboard.

The silver-blue wrapper fell away with ease and Hunk crumpled it, leaning down to toss it in the- _absolutely overflowing garbage container._ God damnit, Lance. Hunk delicately balanced the balled-up wrapper on the towering pyramid of other wrappers and headed for the lower stairs.

The bar wasn't exactly gourmet fare. It was a standard survival tool, flavourless and packed with ideal nutrients and calories. A mixture of dried fruits and nuts provided a small addition of texture and flavour, but for the most part, it was a matter of chewing the solid block into submission and swallowing the dry chunks to get on with whatever a person eating rations needed to do.

10  
14/06/2064  
20:44

Im in med bay for now. I have radiation poisoning. I cant put myself in a pod. Then nobody would be awake to watch. so im gonna wait. Theres a cream thats helpign. My hair fell out. All of it. I just want to live.

Med bay power ok.

Lance

Hunk stared at the week-long gap between entry dates as he descended to the lower decks and into the "slime zone" where the melting ice met the explosion dust in a layer of slippery sludge. The bright screen burned into his eyes. Probably best that Lance didn't write anything. Hunk didn't want the details. He comforted himself by mentally cheering Lance on, willing him to get better as fast as possible.

That was when it happened. The bite that didn't go all the way through the bar. Rather, Hunk's teeth hit a large, very solid object in the middle. Getting over his surprise, Hunk took the offending lump out of his mouth and looked at it. Felt like he'd bitten into a rock.

But it wasn't a rock.

Rolling around in his hand, covered in saliva and bits of partially chewed ration, it was there. Round and unprocessed and impossibly whole. Curiosity struck him, and he tilted the little nuisance between his fingers in the frustratingly dim blue emergency lights. Some kind of nut or seed that made it past the grinder. Neat. Hunk shoved it in one of his pockets. Lance might get a kick out of it later.

And there he was, through the icy doorway and staring upward at the massive form of ancient metal and supernatural technology in front of him, awed by its scope and scale and humbled by its decision to allow him, of all people, anywhere near. His soft footsteps echoed in the massive hangar, drawing attention from machines that never fully slept.

This was another project he'd have to oversee, de-icing the hangar somehow and returning all this water to the internal storage tanks. And then he'd have to deal with the meltdown upstairs, and see if any of the engines were still working, even if they didn't have power and-

He was becoming anxious again. Thinking too far ahead too fast.

Yellow glowed ahead of him, and the other lions rumbled their greetings, turning every so slightly to face him as he walked between their frozen feet.

"Your battery is charged," she slipped into his mind.

"Thanks."

The Yellow Lion lowered her ramp and Hunk climbed inside, fumbling around in the dim twilight towards the blinking green indicator light at the back of the ship. The charging station flashed "100%" in front of his eyes. What a massive relief to see something still functioning on this ship. Nothing broken, nothing leaking, nothing fried or corroded. Just fully charged and ready to go. He disconnected the battery and tucked it under his arm. The indicator light blinked one final time and stopped, leaving Hunk standing in darkness.

"The ship is hurt," she said, and Hunk felt a twinge of sadness, though if it was from her or from himself, he couldn't quite tell.

"I know," said Hunk. "Pretty bad. I promised Lance I'd get him out of here, but… I don't know. Maybe I made a promise I can't keep."

She paused.

"You're smart. You know what to do."

"I mean, yeah," he smoothed his dirty hair back from his face, "I know how to assess structural damage and make a plan and sort out repairs, but I need _power._ That core upstairs isn't gonna last us much longer, and if it leaks out of the bridge, we're all dead anyway. I can fix a broken electrical system or weld some plating on the hull but I just- I can't make something out of nothing."

"You know what to do."

She knew he was thinking about it. He felt at the battery sitting warm and fully charged under his arm. He refused to let himself say it out loud, but she knew. It felt wrong. Invasive. Guilt washed over him, and the hairs on the back of his neck bristled.

His battery was charged.

The lions had power.

The floor underneath him shuddered, and Hunk steadied himself against the cabin walls. Yellow was straining against the ice trapping her the same way Blue did yesterday, shaking violently from side to side.

"Hey, whoa! Easy, girl! I'm not gonna-"

And then it stopped. And Yellow became still once more. The few tiny pilot lights in the cabin shut off, throwing Hunk into utter darkness except for what filtered in through the windshield. All power was gone, and the floor was an awkward diagonal slant.

It was when he reached the bottom of Yellow's exit ramp that Hunk saw why.

She'd lowered herself to the ground, giant paws resting majestically in front of her as her frame leaned on its side. Her armored ribcage had opened itself, exposing the glowing light shining inside. The heart of the Yellow Lion.

The warmth of the core was starting to melt the ice around her belly. It shimmered, and a mist was forming, billowing around like a hot breath from her still lungs. She was giving him herself.

"That's it?" he whispered, stroking her armored leg, "No goodbye?"

Yellow, he guessed, wasn't much for sentimental conversation. He had a problem, and she solved it. Graciously, willingly. It was a good solution, and a temporary one. He could use her power to help repair the ship, and then return it to her once the were back in relative safety. He wasn't killing her. He was… borrowing her.

The core unlatched with a hiss and a thump as several locks released and it slid out of his Lion's body and into his arms. It was powerful just to hold and gave off a soft, warm vibration in his hands.

"I'll get this back into you as soon as I can, girl. I promise. Trust me."

He turned around to face four lions staring at him and one that looked like she was only just sleeping.

"And… Thanks."

It was slow going, hauling the core up the stairs, one flight at a time. It was roughly the size of a large propane tank, and heavy. It was like carrying a small, unwieldy child up a skyscraper. Hunk swapped the core in each hand as the handle dug into his palms and the weight pulled on his already sore shoulders, counting each step and telling himself that if Lance made it through radiation poisoning, he could make it through Leg Day.

He made it. The warm core buzzed against his chest as Hunk heaved it up the last few steps and down the entrance hall. He stretched his arms behind his sweaty neck proudly as he set the glowing metallic cylinder on the kitchen floor and imagined crowds of cheering fans screaming adulation at his accomplishment. Lance still wasn't awake yet.

No matter. Hunk dumped his suit battery and the tablet on the kitchen counter. Lance still being asleep gave Hunk enough time to keep working on that food machine and maybe have it fixed by the time he woke up.

A few jimmied cable connections later, and Hunk had restored power to the whole room. The sudden shock of artificial light searing his retinas reminded him that he'd just spent a year and two days in near total darkness. He dimmed the lights back down to a more reasonable level and sat back down in front of the food machine and his mess of food-covered parts.

Yellow's core was an immediate help. Hunk made one more trip to Pidge's room to retrieve a shared toolkit and he was back in his zone, fixing, cleaning, realigning and putting it all back together. It felt good, when he was fixing. He felt calm and in control. Every problem had a solution, no matter how difficult. It was just a matter of math and engineering and cleaning out the gunk.

3 11  
15/06/2064  
14:06

Oh, fuck, this thing can record audio? Oh, hell yeah- I've been wasting my time.

So, ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking, we are cruising at around ten jillion light years in altitude above all existence and we should arrive at our destination in about T-minus never.

Ok, all joking aside, I'm just bored. The pods are taking a long-ass time to heal. Nobody's ever been in there for that long. I thought if I waited it out one of them might pop out and then I could take a turn and get rid of some of these burns, but, no luck. Gotta do it the old fashioned way.

I really want Taco Bell.

Taco bell was out of the question, but pancakes might suffice.

Hunk snapped the cover panel back into place with a resounding finality and a smug grin of satisfaction. One task: done. No parts needed, no time lost. First day. This was a triumph, and triumphs called for celebration.

Sure, the machine was still dangerously empty, but at least it worked. And the little food left in it oozed gently out of the tube into a bowl like soft-serve ice cream ready to be swirled.

There were a few other leftover ingredients, he found after poking about. Flour, which he had, salt, a little of this and that.

3 12  
15/06/2064  
15:19

Baby, you're all that I want- why you're _lyyyying here_ in my arms! I'm finding it hard to buh-lieve! We're in hyeaaaa-vuuunn.

Bah bah ba-buddapada!

And life is something _something!_ And I found it there in your arms. It isn't too hard to see?

We're in _heaven!_

Now nothing could change what you mean to me uh, there's lots that I could say

But just **hold** me now!

'Cause our _love will light the way_...

The ear-shattering shriek echoed down the halls and into the kitchen. It was followed by another, longer, louder one that made Hunk's heart stop and the flipper jolt in his hands. That pancake landed on the floor in a hot splat and was no longer his concern.

Hunk dropped the pan and ran for the main atrium. Yet another scream rang through the tall, open room, bouncing off the empty hallways and Hunk swore he heard his name that time.

What happened to Lance? Was he being attacked? Surely there was no one else on this ship. Lance had told him many times over yesterday.

Thumping footsteps up ahead, coming down the hall from… medical bay? What was Lance doing up there? And why was he screaming?

"Lance?" he called out, and the footsteps didn't stop. They sped up.

Just around the corner, now. "Lance?" he tried again.

Lance shot into Hunk's view in a blur, colliding with him on the stairs with the force of a cannonball. Hunk was nearly knocked over, but Lance had thrown his arms around him in a deathgrip. It took Hunk several moments to realise he was a sobbing mess.

"Hey, what's wrong?" he slowly smoothed Lance's hair down. "What happened?"

"Oh, thank god," Lance choked. "Oh, god it was real. It's all real. You're real. It actually happened. Oh, thank fucking Christ."

"Oh."

"God, I'm being so stupid," Lance continually smeared his wet face into Hunk's chest. "I'm sorry."

"No, I get it."

"I thought…"

"-That it might have all been a dream," Hunk finished as Lance's voice disappeared into hiccups. "I'm sorry, Lance. I thought I'd cook us breakfast."

"I'm sorry, Hunk."

"Don't be."

"No, I'm just being ridiculous."

"No. You're not. Come get something to eat."

Lance's cheek was warm under his palm as Hunk wiped his tears away. The rest of the ship was so incredibly, constantly, cold. And yet here was his friend, that source of warmth and happiness he'd had his whole life. If Lance was suddenly gone, Hunk thought, maybe he might burst into tears, too.

The pancakes were burning.

Smoke wafted off of the stove and Lance went to grab a cloth while Hunk scraped the fallen pancake off the ground.

"I was doing a little experiment." Hunk dumped the burned leftovers into the trash, forgetting the overflow. "Food goo pancakes and bacon."

"Alright but what is _that?_ " Lance was pointing at the pile of wires surrounding the softly glowing Yellow Lion core.

Hunk sighed. "Those lions are spooky motherfuckers sometimes." He poured a cup of new batter into the pan.

"Tell me about it." Lance hooked his chin onto Hunk's shoulder the way he used to back on Earth, hanging off of Hunk and gliding around behind him in step as he made commentary on Hunk's cooking process. "Smells good. I never really figured out how to cook food goo."

"What you're looking at is the central power core from the Yellow Lion. Lift your chin up. I need to flip this fake-on."

"No shit." Lance whistled at the softly humming cylinder. "That thing is running the stove? How'd you get it?"

"That's what I was saying." Hunk grabbed two plates from the dishwasher. "I heard a voice telling me to go downstairs to the hangar and then… Yellow gave up her power core."

"Is that, um, good news?"

"Well, it's enough power to run the kitchen and a few main level processes. Not enough to get us out of here. But I fixed the food machine and now we can get some ass cheek back on you."

"Nice."

"Then we figure out what to do next."

"No, no, I like the bacon part. Go back to the bacon."

"Then we feed you lots and lots and everything turns out fine forever."

"Fantastic."


End file.
